“Mon frere, mon frere, me refusez vous doncques une place?”
My brother, my brother, do you refuse me a place? (1055)
ETIENNE DE LA BOÉTIE
FRAGMENT D’UNE LETTRE QUE MONSIEUR LE CONSEILLER DE MONTAIGNE ESCRIT À MONSEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE SON PÈRE, CONCERNANT QUELQUES PARTICULARITEZ QU’IL REMARQUA EN LA MALADIE & MORT DE FEU MONSIEUR DE LA BOETIE .
(Lettre datée du mois d’août 1563 et publiée par Montaigne dans La Boétie, La Mesnagerie de Xenophon. Les Regles de mariage, de Plutarque. Lettre de consolation de Plutarque à sa femme. Le tout traduict de Grec en François par feu M. Estienne De la Boetie … item, un Discours sur la mort dudit Seigneur De la Boètie par M. de Montaigne, édition établie par M. de Montaigne [Paris: Frederic Morel, 1571])
Although Derrida’s Politiques de l ’ amitié ( Politics of Friendship ) makes scant reference to La Boétie’s work La Servitude volontaire ( On Voluntary Servitude ), the spectrality of that work impinges on his analysis of Montaigne’s “De l’amitié” (I, 28) (“Of Friendship”). This intertextual ghost puts the essayist’s ethics and politics to the test.1 To be sure, it has become a critical commonplace to evoke Montaigne’s act of mourning in the writing of the Essays as a compensation and a dénégation (disavowal) of the loss of his beloved friend Etienne de La Boétie. This literary practice, which might be regarded as an attempt to incorporate or encrypt the spectral remains of La Boétie’s corpus, also conflates the figure of the friend with that of the brother, who belongs to what Derrida calls a “homosocial political configuration.”2 What is at stake in this literary performance of friendship is its deliteralization, which goes far beyond the simple parameters of fraternity. In the process, it allegorizes the possibility of the political as a democratic phenomenon while suggesting that friendship, like democracy, is neither simple nor pure. According to Derrida, the question of politics is inextricably related to the state of the family. Within this context, friendship can be regarded as a trope for the political or metaphoric matrix of a family romance (“une configuration familiale, fraterniste” (12) “a familial, fraternalist configuration” [viii]). From this perspective the friend would be like the brother, and the possibility of fraternization would associate this relationship with the topoi of equality, freedom, and democracy. As Derrida states: “Pas de démocratie sans respect de la singularité ou l’altérité irréductible, mais pas de démocratie sans ‘communauté des amis’… sans calcul des majorités, sans sujets identifiables, stabilisables, représentables et égaux entre eux” (40) (“There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ … without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal” [22]).
What is foregrounded here is the political translation of friendship not only between friendship and the idea of brotherhood but between La Boétie and Montaigne, who—like Aristotle and Cicero before them—have linked the friend-brother phenomenon to questions of virtue, justice, and political reason. For example, Aristotle’s Politics stresses that the life of the polis is the work of friendship ( phi-las ergon ) and that sociability is based on the idea of philia.
In examining the ways in which Montaigne’s “De l’amitié” functions as the “prosthesis” of La Boétie’s Servitude volontaire, I wish to discuss how that friendship survives or lives on and perhaps even dies once again in the essayist’s text by rendering friendship itself problematic.3 Among the great philosophical meditations on friendship as an experience of mourning, the Montaignian testimony to friendship—recalling Aristotle’s haunting exclamation, “O my friends, there is no friend”—functions as a remembrance that simultaneously forgets. Moreover, Montaigne’s encryption of La Boétie’s discourse into his own demonstrates how a textual metamorphosis can reveal the way in which the psychic and the social intermingle to produce symbolic representations derived from tropes of nourishment and communion.
It might at first appear that the missing corpse, the political treatise against tyranny thematized in La Servitude volontaire —initially framed by the discourse on friendship between Montaigne and La Boétie and subsequently abandoned—is tangential. For how can a compelling argument, composed at a time of political turmoil (the religious civil conflicts) and rejecting the willing obedience of subjects to the power of a single ruler, metonymically mesh with relations of friendship? As a dialogic phenomenon the “essaying” of friendship becomes more complex, whereby the figure of the dead friend lives on (the Ciceronian adage “mortiu uiuunt,” found in Laelius de Amicitia ) and survives by becoming subject to a process that transforms philia into necrophilia, a metamorphosis that ultimately represents a drama of ambivalence.
La Boétie begins La Servitude voluntaire by questioning the parameters of political authority and its relationship to nature. It contains an early reference to Ulysses’ assertion in the Iliad that a soldier must obey his commander out of a sense of duty. This intertextual fragment sets the stage for an evaluation of the pros and cons of monarchy and absolute power. La Boétie declares that freedom is a natural right. However, he also foregrounds the paradox that although men are free by nature, they subject themselves to a singular authority empowered by them through a self-imposed blindness reflected in the oxymoronic trope of voluntary servitude: “Disons donc ainsi, qu’à l’homme toutes choses lui sont comme naturelles … à quoy la nature simple et non altérée l’appelle; ainsi la premiere raison de la servitude volontaire c’est la coutume” (150) (“Let us then say that although all things to which man trains and accustoms himself are natural to him, that alone is innate in him to which his simple and unaltered nature calls him. Thus the first reason for voluntary servitude is custom” [205]). La Boétie’s text is predicated on a concept of nature and social relations that acquires universal dimensions of companionship and fraternity: “La nature, le ministre de dieu, la gouvernante des hom-mes, nous a tous faits de même forme, et comme il semble, à même moule, afin de nous entreconnaitre tous pour compagnons ou plutôt pour frères” (140) (“Nature, the minister of God, the governess of human beings, has made us all of the same form, and as it seems, from the same mold, so that all of us should recognize one another as companions or rather as brothers” [197]).
Anthropomorphically conceived as a benevolent maternal force, nature is represented in La Boétie’s discourse as a collective entity in which the individual is subsumed by the socializing drive of the human species: “Puis donc que cette bonne mère nous a donné tous logés à tous la terre pour demeure, nous a tous logés aucunement en même maison, nous a tous figurés à même patron afin que chacun se pût mirer et quasi reconnoître l’un dans l’autre” (140 – 41) (“Because this good mother has given us all the whole earth to live in, has lodged us, in a way, in the same house, has made us all of the same clay, so that each one should be able to look into the other [as into a mirror] and recognize himself” [197–98]). Paradoxically, La Boé-tie’s vision of universal brotherhood, which is partially based on the Aristotelian concept of nature, projects an imaginary community in which the identity of each individual is correlated with self-identity, or a “fraternelle affection” without difference: “Ceste bonne mere … nous a tous figure a mesme patron afin que chacun se peust mirer et quasi reconnoiste l’un dans l’autres” (119) (“This good mother … has made us all of the same clay, so that each one should be able to look into the other [as into a mirror] and recognize himself” [197–98]).Yet the magnetic attraction of this socializing affinity renders the desire for fraternity subject to nature’s inadequacy to make freedom whole. Exemplification of the human subject as theoretical abstraction, while drawing from what we refer to today as “reason,” nevertheless emerges as naturally subject to contingency or change: “La nature de l’homme est d’être franc et de le vouloir être, mais aussi sa nature est telle que naturellement il tient le pli que la nourriture lui donne” (150) (“Man’s nature is surely to be free, and to want to be free; but his nature is also such that he retains the bias that his upbringing gives him” [205]).
Freedom, as described by La Boétie, has an ironic dimension to it whereby the natural quest for liberty and the unnatural desire to serve coexist: “Or, est-il donc certain qu’avec la liberté, se perd tout en un coup la vaillance: les gens sujets n’ont point d’allégresse au combat ni d’âpreté: ils vont au danger quasi comme attachés et tous engourdis, par manière d’acquit” (153) (“Now it is therefore certain that with the loss of liberty, courage completely disappears. Subjected peoples have no eagerness or spirit for combat. They meet danger as if they were tied up and completely numb as a matter of course” [207]). If servitude risks becoming a universalized phenomena in La Boétie’s discourse, it is because our natural inclinations and innate reason are conceived of as being far less powerful than the imprisoning force of custom. The ungrounded nature of custom differentiates it from justice and allows it to become a second nature capable of enabling servitude to overcome freedom: “La premiere raison pour-quoy les hommes servent volontiers, est parce qu’ils naissent serfs et sont nourris tel” (153) “The first reason why men willingly serve is that they are born slaves and are reared as such” [207]). Within this scheme of things freedom refers not to the rule of law but to a situation sanctioned by the force of habit.
The ideal that La Boétie puts forward rests upon the notion of a utopian community rooted in freedom and equality. With this in mind, La Boétie conceives of friendship in relation to tyranny, which, he suggests, forecloses the possibility of sociability; servility is presented as that which friendship is not:
L’amitié, c’est un nom sacré, c’est une chose sainte; elle ne se met jamais qu’entre gens de bien, et ne se prend que par une mutuelle estime; elle s’entretient non tant par bienfaits, que par la bonne vie. Ce qui rend un ami assuré de l’autre c’est la connoissance qu’il a de son intégrité: les répondens qu’il en a, c’est en son bon naturel, la foi et la constance. Il ne peut avoir d’amitié là où est la cruauté, là ou est desloyauté, là où est l’injustice; et entre les méchants, quand ils s’assemblent c’est un complot, non pas une compaignie; ils ne s’entr’aiment pas, mais ils s’entrecraignent; ils ne sont pas amis, mais ils sont complices. (168–69)
Friendship is a sacred word; it is a holy thing. It never occurs except between honorable people, and it arises only from mutual esteem. It maintains itself not so much by means of good turns as by a good life. What renders a friend assured of the other is the knowledge he has of his integrity. The guarantee he has from him are his good nature, faith [in each other], and constancy. There cannot be friendship where there is cruelty, where there is disloyalty, where there is injustice. Among the wicked when they assemble, there is a plot, not companionship. They do not provide for one another, but fear one another. They are not friends but accomplices. (220)
In opting for friendship through the negativity of these restrictive clauses, La Boétie’s text idealizes harmony through a model of a collective subject in control of its fate. Such a model, however, precludes tyrants, who inspire fear and are never worthy of “estime.” As for the latter, the tyranny of monarchical rule might possibly embrace injustice rather than the autonomy of its subjects and in so doing subvert the possibility of equal exchange and reciprocity: “Estant au dessus de tous [the tyranical leader] et n’ayant point de compaignon, il est déjà au delà de l’amitié, qui a son vrai gibier en l’équalité et ne veut jamais clocher ainsi est toujours égale” (169) (“Because being above all [other people], and not having any peer, he is already beyond the bounds of friendship, which has its true foundation in equality, which does not ever want to be unbalanced, but is always even” [220]). If for La Boétie community, as a plenitudinous entity, is contingent upon communication, the inoperative or “unworked community” is one in which there are neither equals nor friends.
From La Boétie’s perspective friendship is ostensibly a political phenomenon. In its own way La Boétie’s lament affects clear symptoms of a cultural melancholia. This leads him to transform his work of mourning into one of survival, portraying a cannibalistic practice that betrays the presuppositions of innate reason. At the end of his text La Boétie invokes the latent fear of the servants of tyranny, for whom friendship and community are foreign entities. In the passage that follows La Boétie ascribes responsibility for revenge to “le peuple” and memoralistic testimony to subsequent generations as a form of ethico-political volition. As La Boétie’s narrative reveals, the possibility of evil (unmitigated violence) ironically becomes the condition—the limit and the de-limitation— of good:
Mais c’est plaisir de considérer qu’est ce qui leur revient de ce grand tourment, et le bien qu’ils peuvent attendre de leur peine et de leur misérable vie… . Volontiers le peuple, du mal qu’il souf-fre, n’en accuse point le tiran, amis ceux qui le gouvernent … quand chacun aurait une pièce de leur corps, ils ne seraient pas encore, ce leur semble assez satisfait, ni à demi saoulés de leur peine, mais certes encore apres qu’ils sont morts, ceux qui vien-nent après ne sont jamais si paresseux que le nom de ce mange-peuples ne soit noirci de l’encre de mille plumes, et leur reputa-tion déchirée dans mille livres, et les os même par manière de dire, trainés par la postérité, les punissant encore après leur mort de leur méchante vie. (170–71)
But it is pleasant to consider what it is that they get from this great torment, and the benefit that they can expect for their pain and from their wretched life. Usually the people does not blame the tyrant for the wrong that it endures, but accuses those who manage him … each of whom would still not be satisfied, it seems, even if he had a piece of their [torn] bodies, nor half satisfied with their punishment. But certainly, even after they are dead, those who come after are never so lazy that the names of these devourers of peoples may not be blackened by the ink of a thousand pens, their reputation torn apart in a thousand books, and even their bones, so to speak, dragged [through the dirt] by posterity, punishing them still after their death for their wicked life. (221)
Clearly this fantasy of destruction reflects a fascination with evil, perhaps even suggesting what Jean-Luc Nancy has characterized in another context as “a proper positivity of evil.”4 In a way, this giving of death and evil temporarily suspends the ethical ideal of friendship for an absolute obligation, namely, the righting of a wrong. The powerful historical memory revises the identity of friendship through violence and paradoxically demonstrates how such dislocation opens up the possibility of doing justice to the past by projecting it into the future. Ironically, La Boétie’s text enacts what might be termed an uncanny freedom; it reveals the unsettling figure of alterity in the human subject, whereby an appetite for enslavement undercuts the ideality originally proposed. The value of locating friendship in a specific locality (the ideal community) comes undone and paradoxically reifies itself once again by putting the dead in their place. By doing this, La Boétie’s text enacts a rupture with the idea of community as unified entity. He engages in a cathartic process, an ethico-political cleansing of sorts that differentiates and redraws the boundaries of civility (“le nom de ces mange-peuples ne soit noirci de l’encre de mille plumes” (“the names of these devourers of peoples may not be blackened by the ink of a thousand pens”). Interestingly, La Boétie ascribes a certain degree of exemplarity to figures such as Brutus, Cassius, and Hamodius, whose sense of friendship manifested itself in regicide to re-form the values of the polis.
At the core of Montaigne’s writing project is a nostalgic ideal based on an intersubjective communion between two men. This relationship identifies its singularity by situating alterity outside of itself. To be sure, the friendship characterized by Montaigne as “un’ame en deux corps” (I, 28, 190) (“one soul in two bodies” [141]) evokes Aristotle’s argument as reported by Diogenes Laertius. What Derrida terms the “doubly singular definition of the friend” raises important issues as to the political and ethical ramifications concerning the logic of reciprocity in La Boétie’s text; it also foregrounds the exigencies of the homosocial nature of a friendship that desires to make itself safe from an alien other.
Throughout “De l’amitié” one encounters the uncanny spectral impact of La Boétie’s discursive force. One should bear in mind, however, that Montaigne first comes into contact with La Boétie by way of the signature inscribed on La Servitude volontaire. The friendship, as Montaigne suggests, is motivated by a name that precedes an encounter: “Car elle [La Boétie’s text] me fut montrée longue piece avant que je l’eusse veu, et me donna la premiere connoissance de son nom, acheminant ainsi cette amitié” (I, 28, 184) (“For it was shown to me long before I had seen him, and gave me my first knowledge of his name, thus starting on its way this friendship” [136]). The met-onymic chain between pre-text and essay demonstrates how the trans-portive power of language moves from page to name and realizes, through the power of the imagination, a perfect friendship “si entiere et si parfaite que certainement il ne s’en lit guiere de pareilles […] en-tre nos hommes” (I, 28, 184) (“so entire and so perfect that certainly you will hardly read of the like” [136]). The words that inaugurated the process have not disappeared; the thing has not entirely overcome its mediation. Despite everything, Montaigne declares himself “obligé particulierement à cette piece” (I, 28, 184) (“particularly obligated to this work” [136]) Accordingly, La Servitude volontaire still retains its value as a “relique” (relic), serving not only as a reminder of La Boétie’s existence but also as an affective support mediating the most perfect of friendships. Around the crypt occupying the space of the essay the traces or letters of the incursion of death in life emerge. This writerly relic of things past produces the pleasures of necrophilia enacted as a form of literary cannibalism.
“De l’amitié” bears witness to the legacy of a double absence re-alized as a work of mourning: the death of the friend and the excision of La Servitude volontaire. The essay performs this loss and attempts to account for the absence at its center. As a sign of friendship for La Boétie (the essayist’s desire to protect his friend’s text from its counterfeited appropriation by the Protestants’ having renamed it Le Con-tre Un ), Montaigne’s essay not only excises La Servitude volontaire but reveals that it is not even the perfectly elaborated work that it was said to be: “Si y a il bien à dire que ce ne soit le mieux qu’ il [La Boé-tie] peut faire; et si, en l’aage que je l’ay conneu, plus avancé, il eut pris un tel desseing que le mien de mettre par escrit ses fantasies, nous verrions plusieurs choses rares” (I, 28, 184) (“Still, it is far from being the best he could do; and if at the more mature age when I knew him, he had adopted a plan such as mine, of putting his ideas in writing, we should see many rare things” [135]). La Boétie’s text is thus scarcely “élabouré de toute sa suffisance“ (I, 28, 183) (“elaborated with all his skill” [135]). It is no more than an example of juvenilia, perhaps impressive but by no means corresponding to the description with which, just a few lines earlier, Montaigne had revealed his inferiority in relation to his painter’s masterpiece.
In this extraordinary friendship born in letters—La Boétie, “la mort entre les dents” (I, 28, 184) (“with death in his throat” [136]) bequeaths his library to Montaigne—the mourner has yet to find the words to adequately describe it: “Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l’aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer” (I, 28, 188) (“If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed” [139]). To be sure, by engaging in the tropological representation of the sovereignty of friendship, Montaigne’s text disfigures the political thought of La Boétie by transforming the topos of voluntary servitude (“servitude volontaire”) into one of free will (“liberté volontaire”). The dream of perfect presence, of “one soul in two bodies,” has now been dissolved, in the wake of La Boétie’s demise, into the elusiveness of pure smoke (“la fumée,” I, 28, 193): “Tout estant par effect commun entre eux, volontez, pensemens, jugemens, biens, femmes, enfans, honneur et vie … et leur convenance n’estant qu’un’ame en deux corps … ils ne se peuvent ny prester ny donner rien” (I, 28, 190) (“Everything actually being in common between them—wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives, children, honor, and life—and their relationship being that of one soul in two bodies … they can neither lend nor give anything to each other” [141]). This elimination of alterity veers toward transparent communication—“la chose la plus une et unie” (I, 28, 191) (“the most singular and unified of all things” [142])—in which perfect friendship is one that can only be one: “Le secret que j’ay juré ne deceller à nul autre, je le puis, sans parjure, communiquer à celuy qui n’est pas autre: c’est moy” (I, 28, 191) (“The secret I have sworn to reveal to no other man, I can impart without perjury to the one who is not another man: he is myself” [142]). Given its exclusivity, this idealized friendship has nothing left to share.
Montaigne engages in an implicit critique of La Boétie’s idea of “voluntary servitude,” which he regards as a political concept based on a series of social obligations. The “voluntary freedom” that Montaigne refers to in “De l’amitié” is selected as the result of free will and out of affection for the beloved friend. The book that Montaigne had chosen as being responsible for their friendship is now the one to which he responds. La Boétie comes to realize—as Montaigne certainly has discovered—that nature is not an essential matter, nor is it the basis for all that’s good. It has a dark side that succumbs to the poison of enslavement: “Il me semble maintenant que l’amour mesme de la liberté ne soit pas si naturelle” (117) “It now seems that the very love of liberty might not be natural” [197]). If the discourse of friendship is based on reciprocity, the relation that results from political expediency in La Boétie’s text emphasizes subordination. Essaying the concept of friendship enables Montaigne to engage in the simulation of a dialogic encounter that renders the friend otherwise. In dialoguing about friendship, Montaigne draws on the same critical topoi deployed by La Boétie in La Servitude volontaire, namely, friendship, liberty, and tyranny. Unlike La Boétie, however, Montaigne removes his discourse from the public arena and reinscribes it in the privatized space of self-reflection: “Car cette parfaicte amitié dequoy je parle, est indivisble; chacun se donne si entire à son amy, qu’il ne luy reste rien à departir ailleurs” (191) (“For this perfect friendship of which I speak is indivisible; each one gives himself so wholly to his friend that he has nothing left to distribute elsewhere” [141]).
If for La Boétie friendship is a virtue that facilitates the passage to sociability, for Montaigne it is something that is simply extraordinary — “une fois en trois siecles” (I, 28, 184) (“once in three centuries” [136])—since it can only be realized in a privatized locus situated beyond the confines of the public realm. As the essay proceeds, it reveals friendship to be “homo-fraternal” in the sense that its paradigm is always brotherly love or friendship between males, which, as Trevor Hope suggests, is “the foundation of hermeneutic enterprises in the service of the mandate that is central to the disciplinary regime of modernity.”5 Through the restrictive syntax describing what friendship is not, Montaigne’s model of brotherly fraternity, which is also one of passion, designates in its sovereign indivisibility where each man gives wholly of himself—“où l’ homme fust engagé tout entier” (I, 28, 186) (“so that the entire man would be engaged” [138])—to the exclusion of an other. With this in mind, “De l’amitié” thematizes the question of aurality as it relates to the correspondence ( con-venance ) constituting this absolute community of souls. If hearing is central to the communicative utopia of friendship, as suggested in the closing reference to Catullus (II, 28 194) [144]), aural gratification can only be realized as a phenomenon that is thoroughly androcentric: “A dire vray la suffisance ordinaire des femmes n’est pas pour respondre à cette conference et communication” (I, 28, 186) (“To tell the truth, the ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship” [138]).
When, in Politiques de l ’ amitié, Derrida foregrounds the “double exclusion of the feminine” in Montaigne’s text and ascribes to it “the sublime figure of virile homosexuality,” he suggests a mode of male “intercourse” in which self-limitation is built right into the idea of friendship. Not surprisingly, in an allongeail of the Bordeaux edition the assertion of the ineffable quality of friendship is dramatically revised: “Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l’aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en respondant: ‘Par ce que c’estoit luy; par ce que c’estoit moy’” (I, 28, 188) (“ If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I” [139]). This sentence expresses in its terseness and in the balance of its self-identity the harmonious albeit limited parameters of this friendship; it mimetically reproduces the restrictiveness and the exclusivity of perfect friendship.
On another level, however, the ambivalence of Montaigne’s discourse in terms of La Boétie’s model of social communion gives rise to a representation whose effect is power; it is simultaneously the imaginary satisfaction of this desire and its deferred satisfaction. Bearing this in mind, it is important to consider that from a psychoanalytic perspective the introjection of one’s “word thing” functions as a process emanating from primitive fantasies of cannibalistic incorporation and as a defense against loss. What in another context I have termed “Montaigne’s reader’s digest”6 provides the locus for the projection of La Boétie’s “word thing,” yet it also involves the subject’s writerly violence against the lost object that is the result of the essaying process.
Here let us recall the dramatic account of La Boétie’s death as narrated by Montaigne in a letter to his father.7 In “Extraict d’une lettre” the essayist’s “extreme friendship” is used as a pretext to recount the death scene in the name of the divine Father (“que si Dieu vouloit qu’il empirast”; “that if God willed that he get worse”) while ironically remaining the director and main character of the drama (“le dommage serait à moy” [1350]; “the loss would be mine” [1048]):
Ce mesme jour, par ce qu’il fut trouvé bon, je luy dis, qu’il me sieroit mal pour l’extreme amitié que je luy portais si je ne me souciois que comme en sa santé on avoit veu toutes ses actions pleines de prudence & de bon conseil, autant qu’à l’homme du monde, qu’il les continuast encore en sa maladie: & que si Dieu vouloit qu’il empirast, je serais tresmarry qu’à faute d’advisement il eust laissé nul de ses affaires domestiques décousu. [1349–50])8
This same day, because it was judged suitable to do so, I said to him that because of the extreme friendship I bore him, it would be unbecoming to me if I did not take care that, as all his actions in health had been seen to be as full of wisdom and good counsel as those of anyone else in the world, he should continue them still in his sickness; and that if God willed that he get worse, I would be very sorry if for lack of advice he should leave any of his domestic affairs at loose ends. (1048)
Montaigne’s story of La Boétie’s demise, his “prise de la parole” (capture of speech), translates the symbolic death that his narrative is meant to effect. By displacing his violent desire onto the Heavenly Father, Montaigne’s text captures the death scene as the locus of an agonistic encounter and the place from which La Boétie’s sacrifice will commence.
In an apparent gesture to defend La Servitude volontaire against its opportunistic appropriation by Huguenot propagandists, such as Simon Goulard, near the end of “De l’amitié” the essayist lends voice to his dead friend and in so doing problematizes his text, rendering it “implexe , ” or folded within itself. The following passage reveals a discrepancy between La Boétie’s theoretical reflections and his political practice and signifies a scission in the so-called harmony of thought.
Je ne fay nul doubte qu’il ne creust ce qu’il escrivoit, car il estoit assez conscientieux pour ne mentir pas mesmes en se jouant. Et sçay davantage que, s’il eust eu à choisir, il eut mieux aimé estre nay à Venise qu’à Sarlac: et avec raison. Mais il avoit un’autre maxime souverainement empreinte en son ame, d’obeyr et de se soubmettre tres-religieusement aux loix sous lesquelles il estoit nay. Il ne fut jamais un meilleur citoyen, ny plus affectionné au repos de son païs, ny plus ennemy des remuements et nouvelletez de son temps. (I, 28, 194)
I have no doubt that he believed what he wrote, for he was so conscientious as not to lie even in jest. And I know further that if he had had the choice, he would rather have been born in Ven-ice than in Sarlat, and with reason. But he had another maxim sovereignly imprinted in his soul, to obey and submit most religiously to the laws under which he was born. There never was a better citizen, or one more devoted to the tranquillity of his country, or more hostile to the commotions and innovations of his time. (144)
Here Montaigne’s rhetoric engages in the very balancing act that defines the textual practice associated with the genre of the essay. This text simultaneously exculpates the friend from any possible accusation of disloyalty and draws our attention to La Boétie’s enthusiasm for aristocratic republicanism. At the very least this passage foregrounds an ambivalence that simultaneously supports and questions the integrity (in the sense of wholeness) of the friend before the inquiring gaze of the other. In memoralizing the lost friend, Montaigne becomes the brother who functions like a pater familias. As a result, the brother is transformed into a support of the essayist’s self-projection in what is represented as a Montaignian stance of indecision (“Il l’escrivit par maniere d’essay” I, 28, 183–84) (“He wrote it by way of essay” [135]). No longer characterized as what Donald Frame once referred to as Montaigne’s “moral mentor,”9 La Boétie now becomes subordinate to the words of another. The so-called equal engagement of friendship is subject to a revisionary rhetoric that puts the friend on trial (“à l’épreuve”) and makes the discourse on friendship question the exigencies of communion in order for it to become the vehicle for amour-propre. Perhaps here Montaigne puts into effect a topos found in Cicero’s De Amicitia where Laelius suggests that friendship abhors subservience.
By the end of “De l’amitié” Montaigne has been forced to go public with his friendship for La Boétie since it now has to answer to an agency beyond itself (the imperatives of the patriarchal order) while breaking the bond of silence. The death of the friend and the political situation provokes an “outing” of sorts from the indivisibility of friendship, a betrayal of the secrecy that once held this sovereign relationship together but now causes it to unravel. Montaigne’s text projects a “prosthesis” that renders the propriety of La Boétie’s corpse improper due to its re-membering as it is grafted onto the Montaignian corpus. This grafting constitutes an answering for and to the other and accordingly functions as the undoing of the solidity of the sacred bond.
By shifting the focus from “servitude volontaire” to the “liberté volontaire” of friendship, Montaigne’s desire to defend the brother takes on paternalistic proportions; it reveals how this revisionary gesture of friendship, translated through the disfiguration of the missing corpse, requires both the good will and the fratricidal sacrifice represented in La Servitude volontaire.10 In the end we are left with the impression that for friendship to exist it must transcend its self-protected communion in the etymological sense of “common” (com) and “defense” (munis) whereby Montaigne’s citation of Aristotle’s maxim, “O mes amis il n’y a nul amy” (I, 28, 190) (“Oh my friends, there is no friend.” [140]) becomes a declaration of individuation, a mark of distinction that enables the essayist’s text to assert its priority.