Marcel Benabou’s Paradoxical Autobiography

It’s understood. Essentially, Marcel Bénabou’s oeuvre belongs to the galaxy of autobiography. Even if we exclude Jette ce livre avant qu’il soit trop tard before transforming it into an ego-graphy (a questionable position), the two other books surely belong in this tradition.

Nonetheless, neither Narcissus nor Job is taking up the pen here. Most autobiographers write from the position of an original rupture. The founding ties have been broken, and through writing, a torn and sundered consciousness attempts to reweave a few threads of the ravelled link. Thanks to exile, Marcel Bénabou has indeed ended up becoming this unhappy consciousness. But this autobiographical enterprise is, at least in the usual sense, the least Rousseauist imaginable—which is what gives it its value. It is not guided by the search for self-knowledge, nor by the problematic of guilt and fault, nor by narcissistic passion, nor by any other form of self-torment. The most powerful and active motives of the autobiographical quest are absent here.