The Memoir as Method: On Self-Writing as an Act of Political Theory

• In Event: Seeking New Directions in Contemporary Thought

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to make a methodological intervention in the field of political theory by arguing that the act of writing memoir may also be an act of political theorizing. Just as Sheldon Wolin argues in Politics and Vision, that political theory is about “fashion[ing] a political cosmos out of political chaos” ([1960] 2004, p. 9), memoir is about fashioning a sense of oneself and the events of one’s life during a particular moment in time, which, I contend, include one’s political environs. From Freud to the phenomenologists, formulating a theory of modern political subjectivity has been a project of political theory. With this being the case, is it reasonable to assert that a subject’s own attempt to interpret their subjectivity represents an act of political theorizing? The justification for this project stems from two provocations. First, Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim in Beyond Good and Evil that all “great philosophy” is “the personal confession of the author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” ([1886] 1958, p. 203). Second, Wolin’s claim that political theory is a vocation (1969). The paper proceeds by defining memoir as a specific genre of self-writing and then compares its features and functions to the discussions had by political theorists regarding how to address methodology, particularly since political science’s behavioralist revolution.

Author

• Alison Parks, Stetson University