"Among the many ways to characterize Marcel Bénabou's work (and there are hundreds of them -authobiographical, historical, memorial, virtual, epic, ludic, comic, post-colonial, Jewish, kabbalistic, oulipian, borgesian, rousseauist, rousselian, mallarmean, pataphysician, and so on), there is one that has resonance with some of the recent turns in literary criticism. We are referring to the cultural and the textual, the "what" or "why" of a text, on the one hand, and the "how" on the other. If there is a single most prominent characteristic of Marcel Bénabou's work that can be taken as an injunction for literary criticism, it is indeed that "the 'why'

[...] can only be grasped [...] through a minute analysis of the 'how', as he puts it, with wink at his own endeavor of re-writing Roussel's How I Have Written Some Of My Books into his own Why I Have Not Written Any Of My Books. The why, it seems for Marcel Bénabou, necessarily always echoes the how and the how, the why. We seem to have forgotten that it really could not be otherwise."

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