“Reading” is a term that, through overuse, can easily become confused with interpretation. In fact, there is a crucial difference: Reading involves the undoing of interpretative figures; because it is not an operation opposed to the understanding but rather a precondition for it, it allows us to question whether the synthetic moves of the understanding can close off a text. It leads away from meaning to such problems as the text’s constitution and meaning generation. Unlike interpretation, which implies a development over the course of a narrative toward a single figure reconciling all its diverse moments, reading states the logic...

One difference between shame and embarrassment in Rousseau can be stated quite simply. Shame is a passion productive of discourse. The confessing done under its aegis seems marvelously able to serve as an action of which to be ashamed, and so to provoke more confession. Embarrassment, on the other hand, is tonguetied, an anacoluthon in the grammar of feelings. Where, under influence of timidity, Rousseau manages to blurt something out nonetheless, the effect is not to end the silence but most often to prolong it, rendering the hapless speaker even more incapable of timely speech. The blurted phrase is less...

Baudelaire’s work is far from self-evidently autobiographical.Les Fleurs du mal, for instance, cannot be easily compared with a self-declared poetic autobiography like Victor Hugo’sContemplations, whose poems are of decidedly personal inspiration, bear dates that attach them to experience, and lay out a plausible narrative of poetic development. In contrast, Baudelaire’s undated poems appear impersonal and, in their emblematic character, untethered to experience. Although the poet does give the collection the status of an expressive work in one letter to Ancelle: “Do I have to tell you, you who have guessed it no more than the others, that in...

What would a Levinasian autobiography look like? Is such a thing imaginable? The question is directed in the first instance at autobiography, as a question concerning its ability to go beyond the representation of the subject to write the encounter with the absolutely other for which Levinas’s ethical philosophy calls. But it is also, in the second instance, a question for Levinas, concerning the potential of autobiography to represent an alterity perhaps not fully accounted for by his philosophy. This double question presides over the reflection that follows.

Certainly, the notion of Levinasian self-writing is, at first blush, unpromising. In...

Critics of autobiography who have cut their teeth on Rousseau’sConfessionscannot help but be sensible to numerous differences when they begin reading De Quincey and Baudelaire. One of those differences, at first little more than a direction given a motif, is indicative of a shift in the strategies for responding to the other in Modernist texts, among whom—against the usual tendency to group him with the Romantics—I am counting De Quincey as an early prototype. Through its connection to aesthetics, this motif can let us consider what the Modernist autobiographer, writing in the wake of theRêveries,...

De Profundis, Wilde’s autobiographical letter, is motivated by a double silence, and with it, a double secret and a double responsibility that say much about Wilde’s concept of the I in its relation to the other. As we shall see, these two silences, which bring us into the arena of autobiography yet also bar entrance to it because muteness threatens to make confession problematic, are divided over whether that relation is under the aegis of conditional or unconditional laws, repeating the same division found in the discussion of hospitality in De Quincey. There, I discussed the two cases in isolation;...