From life writing to thing writing: François Bon’s Autobiographie des objets

Abstract

This article considers François Bon’s Autobiographie des objets in the wake of recent turns towards the object in philosophy and anthropology, and in the context of ‘thing theory’ within literary studies. It asks to what extent such strains of thought, organised around the object, are compatible with autobiography’s generic privileging of a writing subject, but suggests that the meeting of these two arenas foregrounds the increased ubiquity of object-oriented ontologies and material approaches in all realms of the humanities. In François Bon’s text, the pull of the subject remains nonetheless strong, speaking to the challenge of this shift. Ambiguously suspended, indeed, between object impassivity and subjective bias, this friction indicates, I will suggest, that such a novel ‘pact’ between autobiography and the inanimate object realm is precarious, and perhaps ultimately unsustainable.