'I , having died: Foucault and the writing of the Self'

Abstract

This dissertation takes as its case studies two memoirs written in the nineteenth century, one by the French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin and the other by Pierre Riviere, a young man who brutally slaughtered his mother, sister and brother. Foucault was so fascinated by these two texts that he saw to their introduction and publication. This dissertation is a project on Foucault as much as it is on the memoirs which haunted him: through a reading of the memoirs that is also always interwoven with a reading of Foucault, this dissertation shows that the writing of the self necessitates an encounter with text that bears, from the outset, a fundamental relationship with death.