Susan Suleiman's Risking Who One Is is the creation of an existential warrior. Throughout, the author reminds us that from birth we are what we are and not much more. To set ourselves in relation with our environs, to become who we are, we must push ourselves to the limits of our intellectual and physical experience. Such are the risks she has taken in Le Roman à thèse, ou l'autorité fictive (1983) and more so in the prismatic autobiography Budapest Diary: Searching for the Motherbook (1996); no less, of late, in the tenor of Crises of Memory (2006) and other works on writers born in the wake of the death camps; in the new approach she takes to literary history in French Global, co-edited with Christie McDonald (2010), as its title suggests, that extends the borders of the current state of French studies. Of these, in its introspective style, the Motherbook best tells its readers that doing literary history or criticism involves taking creative risks—calling ourselves in question, taking a remove from the persons we imagine ourselves to be in our daily lives, and even in working against ourselves in order to find a creative drive in alienation. Readers infallibly find in the writing what elsewhere anthropologist Marc Augé calls ‘an ethnology of self,’ which he implies to be that moment when a subject risks looking at itself from afar, when it begs itself to wonder ‘who’ or ‘what’ it is and, in the best and most intransitive sense, it begins to become.

In a recent essay, Augé asks himself what it means to age and how reflection on the passage of time causes him to find in myriad memory-images a paradox of proximity and distance—the very matter with which the ethnologist must contend at all times. Contrary to the girth of Simone de Beauvoir's monumental La vieillesse, his slim monograph begins with an extensive description of his cat. As time passes he recalls how the kitten had cavorted, as Montaigne had said of his own errant writing, à sauts et à gambades, jumping high onto a dresser whence it could look over the author's world below.