Psychoanalysis and Autobiography: Leiris, Freud and the Obstacle to Self-Knowledge

Psychoanalysis and autobiography are both projects of self understanding. In both, the attempt to understand oneself reaches a limit. What is the nature of the limit to self-knowledge? The first chapter, “Mors” of Michel Leiris’s Scraps (Fourbis), the second volume of his The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), richly explores the limits encountered in the attempt to understand oneself, and the circumstances in which it runs into opacity. There are two kinds of obstacles to self-knowledge, and both can be read in Freud’s famous metaphor of the navel of the dream. We could either think of a well-hidden, inaccessible nucleus of meaning or of a network that spreads infinitely, its edges impossible to trace. These two images of obstacles each support a certain structure of meaning and inquiry. Leiris’s text oscillates between the two models.