Bio-mythographies : a study of textual reflexivity in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paul de Man, Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida.

Re-reading Rousseau, using cognate works by de Man, Althusser and Derrida, this
thesis hopes to destabilise the convention of reading 'confessional' texts in terms of
authorial intention.
Chapter One undermines critical responses to Rousseau's work, tracing a tradition of
reading which rejects his oeuvre, not due to a rigorous reading of his texts, but
through an ad hominem attack. We establish de Man, Althusser and Derrida as
writers who lie outside this tradition.
Chapter Two examines the intellectual debate surrounding the revelation of Paul de
Man's wartime journalism, concentrating on this journalism's power to contaminate
his oeuvre. We unsettle the terms of this debate, revealing its reliance upon a cryptobiographical
reading of the author irito the text. We account for the problematic
nature of de Man's deconstructive stance differently when we read de Man's texts as a
conscious type or copy of Rousseau's texts.
Chapter Three studies the anti-Althusserian polemic which attacked"his 'theoretical'
Marxism with reference to insanity and murder. Again, a reading which might have
located a resistance to theory within theory itself instead favours a reductive,
biographical reading. We trace a reading of Rousseau in Althusser's work in order to
destabilise this debate.
Chapter Four looks at the concepts of scandal and slander and their current usage in
both legal and literary contexts. Our aim here is to unite our authors in the shared aim
of re-synonimising the two terms so as to reveal biography as necessarily fictional.
Rousseau's Confessions is re-read as an instance where the concepts of slander and
scandal are equated.
Chapter Five upsets a traditional theory of the archive when it reads Althusser's
autobiography as a deliberate copy of Rousseau's Confessions.
Finally, Chapter Six unites all our writers in a discussion of the necessarily fictive
nature of a re-iterable autobiography.