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E. S. Burt. Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire and Wilde. New York: Fordham UP, 2009. 268 pp. ISBN 978-0823230914, $28.00.
If writing about autobiography has customarily focused on the narrative of the self, the project of self-knowledge, and self-revelation, E. S. Burt's challenging new book, Regard for the Other, declares its distinctiveness right up front. By focusing on the question of the other in texts that purport to be about the self, Burt tends to an issue that infl ects all autobiographies, whether they know it or not. In so doing, she opens a way of reading autobiography otherwise-by taking into account not only the "I's" specular relation to another (self), but its relation to the radically other via "autothanatography."
Burt's topic is a daunting one. By defi nition, the other is elusive (the OED calls the other "that one of two" that remains after one is "taken, defi ned, or specifi ed"). When it is taken into the orbit of the subject and determined or objectifi ed, as happens in the subject-centered narratives of autobiography, the other is no longer exactly "other." Yet the radically other does inhabit autobiography, according to Burt, although it has gone largely unnoticed in studies of the genre. In addition to the represented other against whom the subject defi nes itself, and the other to whom the "I" addresses itself as it confesses, Burt puts forward a destabilizing "third alterity"-the uncontrollable effects of autobiographical writing with which the autobiographer must contend. This third term, which exceeds the specular couple and operates as an impenetrable enigma or secret language beyond the subject's knowledge and mastery, opens up the genre so that the usual critical standards of judgment- veracity, adequacy, sincerity, and the like-no longer pertain. This radical alterity disrupts (or interrupts, to use Burt's linguistic term) the "I" as a cohesive, knowing subject responsible for the truthful...