LIFE: BIOGRAPHY AS CONFLICTUAL COHERENCE

Abstract

In the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student, biography was considered “an unloved stepchild” of the historical discipline. The naive empiricism of its soup-to-nuts narratives seemed deaf to any theory that might call the biographer's craft into question. In 2009, the American Historical Review honored the genre of biography with a roundtable on its creative renewal. Oddly (and regrettably) there was no mention of the work of Jerrold Seigel in any of the roundtable essays, though he had published three innovative biographical works over the previous thirty years. Characterizing Seigel as a biographer by trade would, to be sure, seriously diminish the scope of his scholarship. But two of his seven books have been full biographies, and in two others a biographical approach has been central to his modus operandi. A leading figure in refashioning the genre, he has been quite conscious of the implications of that commitment. In 1987 he ended an article on Durkheim with a challenge: “our knowledge of the human world must be able to survive the recognition of its personal sources.” Three years later he concluded an article on “the personal roots of Foucault's thinking” with another provocation to recent preoccupations in the discipline: “the proclaimed death of the subject is not some newly discovered set of relations that produce the illusion of human will and intentions as residues of their silent operation, but the action of a subjectivity that will not speak its name.”