Oneself as Others: Aurelius and Autobiography

Abstract

Scholarship finds the autobiographical Book 1 of Aurelius’s Meditations peculiar in that it (1) lacks direct enunciation of the self , and (2) focuses instead on the description of others , who (3) are themselves stripped of biographical content. Philippe Lejeune’s claim that autobiography aims to construct the account of a life whose diachronicity is completely effaced by its meaning helps make sense of these anomalies. The same aim also motivates the Late Stoic injunction to examine one’s “representations” or phantasiai , which exhibit a specular relation to the subject that has them.