Starting from Montaigne's essays and Rousseau's Confessions, this work examines the premises of recent autobiographical writing in France with reference to contemporary French theoretical formations. The nouvelle autobiographie, emerging from the nouveau roman, consists of documentary or biographical, (meta-)fictional, and (meta-)reflective text fragments, in whose montage the fragility and questionable nature of identity is reflected. The main part investigates how Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon, in a departure from the anti-subjectivist poetics of the nouveau roman, constitute new forms of autobiographical subjectivity in their texts Compagnie, Enfance, and Le Jardin des Plantes, which are part of the nouvelle autobiographie. This subjectivity arises from the interplay of (meta-)reflection on the writing process, the authors' conceptualization of their works, and their language, and is aesthetically realized in the text through a performative act. The autobiographical subjectivity generated in the text no longer refers to the author as an empirical person but to an aesthetic conception through which an artistic subject is defined.