Whether one is talking about institutional identity politics or wider geopolitical crises, the question of how to ‘be contemporary,’ how to be an intellectual subject with one's contemporaries, involves taking risk. In Susan Suleiman's book whose title is included in my own title here—Risking Who One Is— she discusses in particular the problem of modernist and postmodernist views of subjectivity in relationship to historical events, their representations, and the actions (or lack thereof) of artists and intellectuals. She worries especially about the relationship between those of us who work with words and those who work with ‘rough reality’:

Suleiman asks how intellectuals can help create ‘a world where dialogue is not only valued over butchery, but actually prevails.’ Can they? Can we? As I write these words, in July 2014, the world is reeling from the unspeakable human suffering in Ukraine and in Gaza, and in too many other parts of the world.

It is in preface to her questionings about the status and function of the intellectual—past, present, and future—that Suleiman celebrates a central practice undertaken both consciously and unconsciously by those of us who are intellectually and politically driven: our ‘strong autobiographical reading’ of our contemporaries. As indicated in the epigraph above, strong autobiographical reading ‘is done by anyone who reads his or her contemporaries for the sake of self-recognition, an expanded historical awareness, and a sense of at least potential collective action.’ Suleiman continues: ‘This pattern suggests that “being contemporary” is necessarily an unstable condition, a process of movement toward an open future.’