“De l’experience” (III, 13)
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
MARCEL PROUST
Tout autre est tout autre.
JACQUES DERRIDA, “DONNER LA MORT”
For decades we have upheld the illusion of a logo-centric ontology underlying the Essays. Nowhere do critics experience that idealized moment of jubilation of the oneness of Montaigne with his text more than in “De l’experience” (III, 13) (“Of Experience”). More often than not, the critical literature on Montaigne (from Frame to Friedrich to Defaux) adheres to a Neoplatonic concept of mimesis realized through the voice of a subject bound to a preexistent idea.1 These readers, often following in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve and Thibaudet,2 ascribe to the text an ontological priority, a resolution according to which self-reflexivity is anchored in a textual production that, they claim, reflects being in the present or what might be described as the ideality of the word become flesh. In short, they engage in a simulation that makes the real empirically apprehensible based on a claim to mastery of knowledge. By engaging in such a hermeneutic practice, these readers of the Essays attempt to render the impropriety of Montaigne proper and thus, through the imposition of a “romantic” rhetoric, ironically engage in what they accuse others of doing, namely, providing anachronistic readings of the text.
EXPERIENCE ANDIDENTIFICATORY MODALITIES
To be sure, experience, here figured as a “condition mixte,” must be seen as the result of the reading process implicated in life’s journey, as a bridge or crossing, for it is in that process that hermeneutic meta-narratives are disassembled and master terms are challenged. Ironically, etymologically the word “essai,” which means both “balance” (as in the scales of justice) and “trial,” suspends any absolute rule of law in the very process of writing. In other words, the quest for knowledge resists totalization: “Je prononce ma sentence par articles descousus, ainsi que de chose qui ne se peut dire à la fois et en bloc” (III, 13, 1076) (“I speak my meaning in disjointed parts, as something that cannot be said all at once and in a lump” [824]). Accordingly, it is paramount that one realizes the impossibility of the text fulfilling itself through the internal construction of identity. Indeed, identity can never be made essential so that it can attain the false euphoria that plenitude is supposed to provide. Rather, temporality renders the representation of the self unstable, for it is modulated by sensations and mediated by the rhetorical dynamics of the imagination: “J’ay un dictionnaire tout à part moy: je passe le temps, quand il est mauvais et incommode: quand il est bon, je ne le veux pas passer, je le retaste, je m’y tiens” (III, 13, 1111) (“I have a vocabulary all my own. I ‘pass the time,’ when it is rainy and disagreeable; when it is good, I do not want to pass it; I savor it, I cling to it” [853]). In this essay what we call identity is represented as a dynamic phenomenon resisting the establishment of forced boundaries. It is the product of experience, conceived as textual commentary, which confronts the figure of the writer with alterity, according to which the self is formed through a series of identificatory modalities. “Combien souvent et sottement à l’avanture ay-je estandu mon livre à parler de soy?” (III, 13, 1069) (“How often and perhaps how stupidly have I extended my book to make it speak of itself!” [818]) These modalities of perspective represent multiples axes of vision that demarcate a fragmented narrative, carrying the subject across a series of borders. Subject and object of narration are dislocated from one another and subsequently shatter the ideality of oneness associated with consubstantiality: “J’ordonne à mon ame de regarder et la douleur et la volupté de veuë pareillement … ferme, mais gayement l’une, l’autre severement, et selon ce qu’elle y peut aporter, autant songneuse d’en esteindre l’une que d’estendre l’autre” (III, 13, 1110 –11) (“I order my soul to look upon both pain and pleasure with a gaze equally … firm, but gaily at the one, at the other severely, and, according to its ability, as anxious to extinguish the one as to extend the other” [853]).
For Montaigne experience is the result of encounters with otherness: “Cette longue attention que j’employe à me considerer me dresse à juger aussi passablement des autres: (III, 13, 1076) “This long attention that I devote to studying myself trains me also to judge passably of others” [824]). What Montaigne sees in the essay is always already something else: “Nostre vie est composée, comme l’armonie du monde, de choses contraires” (III, 13, 1068) (“Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things” [835]). Alterity is engendered in the act of writing and temporality subverts the con-substantiality that is the stated desire of self-portraiture: “Je fons et eschape à moy” (III, 13, 1101) (“Thus do I melt and slip away from myself” [845]). The horizon of knowledge is thus not fixed in any of its forms. The indistinctness of the world in its infinite movement in time and space creates aporias of cognition betraying what may otherewise be perceived as unproblematic.
The act of essaying is a process of exteriorization; it opens the desire that binds the narrative and opens the self- portrait as much to the past as to the future. The process whereby the past never stops passing through represents an archaeology of the self, as depicted in the essayist’s narrative of interrupted sleep: “A celle fin que le dormir mesme ne m’eschapat ainsi stupidement, j’ay autresfois trouvé bon qu’on me le troublat pour que je l’entrevisse” (III, 13, 1112) (“To the end that sleep itself should not escape me thus stupidly, at one time I saw fit to have mine disturbed, so that I might gain a glimpse of it” [854]). To experience sleep one must interrupt the very experience, for neither experience nor authorship can partake fully of the plenitude of the self in the specificity of the moment: “Nous cherchons d’autres conditions, pour n’entendre l’usage des nostres, et sortons hors de nous, pour ne sçavoir quel il y fait” (III, 13, (“We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside” [857]).
What emerges in the writing of the essay is an aporetic self; its representation demonstrates the inadequacy of the example and, ultimately, the inability to fix the present: “J’ay des portraits de ma forme de vingt et cinq et trente cinq ans; je les compare avec celuy d’asteure: combien de fois ce n’est plus moy” (III, 13, 1102) (“I have portraits of myself at twenty-five and thirty-five; I compare them with one of the present: how irrevocably it is no longer myself!” [846]). The aporia is thus not a dead end, but it engenders the movement that is inherent to the essaying process, for it results in the noncoincidence of Being. “Nostre vie n’est que mouvement” (III, 13, 1095) (“Our life is nothing but movement” [840]). If, as Richard Regosin has suggested, in the essay “judgment is a surrogate of memory, the memory- duration of experience can never reconstitute the wholeness of its interiority”:3 “A faute de memoire naturelle j’en forge de pa-pier, et comme quelque nouveau symptome survient à mon mal, je l’escris” (III, 13, 1092) (“For lack of a natural memory I make one of paper, and as some new symptom occurs in my disease, I write it down” 837–38).
Experience, as textual practice, can thus never be made essential, for the very notion of essaying is opposed to essentialism and the absolute singularity of the instant:
Combien de fois changeons-nous nos fantaisies? Ce que je tiens aujourd’huy et ce que je croy, je le tiens et le croy de toute ma croyance… . Mais ne m’est-il pas advenu, non une fois, mais cent, mais mille, et tous les jours, d’avoir ambrassé quelque autre chose à tout ces mesmes instrumens, en cette mesme condition, que depuis j’aye jugée fauce? (II, 12, 563)
How many times we change our notions! What I hold today and what I believe, I hold and believe it with all my belief… . But has it not happened to me, not once, but a hundred times, a thousand times, and every day, to have embraced with these same instruments, in this same condition, something else that I have since judged false? (423)
Thinking, as it is figured in the tropes constituting the text, stands as a challenge to science and calculation. In the Montaignian essay experience has no horizon if one conceives of it as its name signifies: the idea of a limit. In epistemological terms, aporia underscores the very idea of the signifying process constituting experience as commentary. The work of the essay goes beyond that which is considered essential or proper, and this process demystifies the very idea of the presence of the present:
Et quand à ces mots: present, instant, maintenant, par lesquels il semble que principalement nous soustenons et fondons l’intelligence du temps, la raison le descouvrant le destruit tout sur le champ: car elle le fend incontinent et le part en futur et en passé comme le voulant voir necessairement desparty en deux. (II, 12, 603)
And as for these words, present, immediate, now, on which it seems that we chiefly found and support our understanding of time, reason discovering this immediately destroys it; for she at once splits and divides it into future and past, as though wanting to see it necessarily divided in two. (456)
The practice of essaying produces fragments, textual particles fuctioning as part-objects, whose resonances are displayed in the tensions between Eros and Thanatos and the desire for wisdom:
Je la [life] jouys au double des autres, car la mesure en la jouyssance depend du plus ou moins d’application que nous y prestons. Principallement à cette heure que j’apercoy la mienne si briefve en temps, je la veux estendre en pois; je veux arrester la promptitude de sa fuite par la promptitude de ma sesie. (III, 13, 1111)
I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. (853)
Never fully accessible, the fragment produces cuts in what would be the text’s recording energy of inscription, which negotiates between presence and absence and represents the potentially present and almost lost erotic perigrinations of the psyche. In the sphere of vision, the emergence and the fading of the “I” produces a fragmentation between Being and becoming. The aporia between the “I” and the objects of observation and desire simultaneously conceals and reveals the psychic drama in the scopic field.
The so-called confessional nature of this essay functions metaphorically as a kind of “striptease” whose partial exposure attains a quasi-erotic quality by transcending the regime of vision based on the rapport between seeing and being seen. Montaigne’s “De l’experience” presents us with the immodest offering of the tropological representation of the essayist’s body and a taxonomy of the highly personal yet banal aspects of everyday life: teeth, radishes, defecation. Montaigne’s entire body comes under the gaze of the reader as an exposed piece of flesh in the corpus constituting the text. Yet this very act of exposure does not unveil that which is hidden, for the representation of the body paradoxically renders it somewhat imperceptible in its nakedness and state of abandonment, leaving the eyes with nothing to focus on.
In “De mesnager sa volonté” (III, 10) (“Of Husbanding Your Will”) the text presents an ideality that is foregrounded by the distinction made between natural desire and the “desreiglement de nostre fantasie” (III, 10, 1009) (“the disorder of our imagination” [771]), which seemingly is disavowed. If desire is to be tamed at all, it can only be realized through a process of domestication achieved by circumscribing it:
La carriere de nos desirs doit estre circonscripte et restraincte à un court limite des commoditez les plus proches et contigues; et doit en outre leur course se manier, non en ligne droite qui face bout ailleurs, mais en rond, duquel les deux pointes se tiennent et terminent en nous par un brief contour. (III, 10, 1011)
The range of our desires should be circumscribed and restrained to a narrow limit of the nearest and most contiguous good things; and moreover their course should be directed not in a straight line that ends up elsewhere, but in a circle whose two extremities by a short sweep meet and terminate in ourselves. (773)
When it is salubrious, it seems that desire follows the parameters of nature’s gait; otherwise it risks getting lost in the vertiginous labyrinth of the imagination. It is here suggested that proper desire has its limits in the laws of nature, whose order is guaranteed by what can only be characterized as an “esprit de géometrie”: “Ceux desquels on voit le bout sont siens, ceux qui fuient devant nous et desquels nous ne pouvons joindre la fin sont nostres” (III, 10, 1009) (“Those whose limits we can see are hers, those that flee before us and whose end we cannot reach are ours” [771]). This mathematical reasoning rejects the lawlessness associated with the Greek concept of paranomos, suggesting that unruly desire can be governed by the power of the law.
Yet the parameters of desire depicted in “De l’experience” represent a series of modalities of perspective, motivated by the love of wisdom, in which the multiple axes of vision partake of a narrative line that carries the represented subject across a series of thresholds. By becoming other as a result of the undoing of singularity and the vicissitudes of desire that the essaying process puts into practice, both subject and object of the narrative are occluded from one another and thereby shatter the symmetry of the mirror vision.
“THE EPISTEMOLOGY THAT IS NOT ONE”
The opening of Montaigne’s essay is based on a paraphrase of the first line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a text in which the latter declares that by nature all men desire to know. Aristotle’s epistemology was conceived as a theoretical science that could delineate the causes and principles of what one can know. From this perspective, metaphysics may be viewed as the science of Being, the study of things as they are; objects are elucidated through the establishment of totalized meaning, which guarantees truth.
However, in Montaigne’s text Aristotle’s incipit “Omnes homines natura scire desiderant” (“All men desire by nature to know”) rather curiously changes its focus by turning attention away from knowledge to desire through the restrictive force of a syntactic negation: “Il n’est desir plus naturel que le desir de connoissance” (III, 13, 1065) (“There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge” [815]). Montaigne has taken Aristotle’s “desiderant” (a verb in the third-person plural), nominalized it, and made it multiple, implying that there are many different types of desire and reinforcing the sense of difference as derived from the repetiton of the same. For Montaigne thought becomes instrinsic to the drive associated with desire, and the latter, as it manifests itself in the performance of the essay, transcribes the errancy of being. In a way desire suggests what is to come and thereby collapses into the deceptive phenomenon of self-identity. As a result, the essaying process suspends the teleological thrust of Aristotelian metaphysics and its doctrine of ethics based on a principle of totalization. Like the lover’s quest for an impossible erotic object, the passion for transgression and for trespassing the boundary of possibility alluded to here refers to a thinking process beyond knowledge or a naming beyond ordinary nomination. Desire thus simultaneously functions as a promise and divestment of wholeness.
Montaigne’s text sugggests the impossibility of maintaining the self-identity of knowledge. “Nous ouvrons la matiere et l’espandons en la destrempant; d’un subject nous en faisons mille, et retombons, en multipliant et subdivisant, à l’infinité des atomes d’Epicurus” (III, 13, 1067) (“By diluting the substance we allow it to escape and spill it all over the place; of one subject we make a thousand, and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’infinity of atoms” [817]). Montaigne’s text clearly parallels Aristotle’s in the belief that sensory experience—particularly sight—enables us to delineate similarities of “the same thing.” Whereas Aristotle’s epistemology proceeds from the projection of inductive generalizations in order to construct universals from the study of particulars, Montaigne discovers in the vicissitudes of experience a challenge to the infelicitious consequences of the rule of law. Beyond that, the passion for truth produces the cognitive equivalent of manifest destiny, a phenomenon that trespasses the possibility of closure by engaging the desiring subject in the seductive power of the imagination: “Il pense remarquer de loing je ne sçay quelle apparence de clarté et verité imaginaire; mais, pendant qu’il y court, tant de difficultez luy traversent la voye, d’empeschemens et de nouvelles questes, qu’elles l’esgarent et l’enyvrent” (III, 13, 1068) “It thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered” [817]).
At the heart of Montaigne’s epistemological critique is the belief that difference cannot be absolutized:
La consequence que nous voulons tirer de la ressemblance des evenemens est mal seure, d’autant qu’ils sont tousjours dissemblables; il n’est aucune qualité si universelle en cette image des choses que la diversité et varieté… . La dissimilitude s’ingere d’elle-mesme en nos ouvrages; nul art ne peut arriver à la similitude… . La ressemblance ne faict pas tant un comme la difference fait autre. Nature s’est obligée à ne rien faire autre, qui ne fust dissemblable. (III, 13, 1065)
The inference that we try to draw from the resemblance of events is uncertain, because they are always dissimilar: there is no quality so universal in this aspect of things as diversity and variety… . Dissimilarity necessarily intrudes into our works; no art can attain similarity… . Resemblance does not make things so much alike as difference makes them unlike. Nature has committed herself to make nothing separate that was not different. (815)
By avoiding the establishment of identity without difference, Montaigne’s text presents a more radical approach that resists teleological or dialectically grounded considerations. Difference is that which prevents knowledge from the paralysis of indifference. If truth becomes little more than an illusion due to the impossibility of rendering knowledge subject to the false logic of indifference, any attempt to establish the essence of things can only fail, for it ignores the alterity that subscribes to the work of difference.
In a sense, Montaigne’s text produces an epistemology that is not entirely one. Resemblance enables signification to transcend undifferentiated sameness. What this epistemology suggests is that the cornucopia of possibilities produced by the differences within the same cannot be contained. To live with possibility is to live with difference and to accept a certain epistemological anxiety resulting from the inability to live with indifference. Only then can one confront the vicissitudes of knowledge and life and the impossible situation that difference opens up. Paradoxically ignorance remains the only unquestionable truth of human knowledge.
The oxymoronic reference to “universal diversity” constitutes a paradox since the very idea of diversity undercuts universality. It is this figure which disables the establishment of a topology of knowledge and the parameters defining it. Montaigne’s epistemology reveals a structure of exemplarity; the interplay between resemblance and difference in terms of the discussion of the “event” destabilizes identity in the very process of iterability. What may be truly singular about diversity is that it is always ready to open itself up to the alterity of another experience through the writing of the essay.
The play of difference as it is presented in this essay reveals, by means of a reference to Apollo, how philosophical language can become poetic by going beyond the boundaries of the perceptible and not in representing it as truth. The pursuits of a probing mind are boundless, translating what Lacan has described as libidinal energy in the continual process of symbolization.
Ce que declaroit assez Appollo, parlant tousjours à nous doublement, obscurement et obliquement, ne nous repaissant pas, mais nous amusant et embesongnant. C’est un mouvement irregulier, perpetuel, sans patron, et sans but. Ses inventions s’eschauffent, se suyvent, et s’entreproduisent l’une l’autre. (III, 13, 1068)
Apollo revealed this clearly enough, always speaking to us equivocally, obscurely, and obliquely, not satisfying us, but keeping our minds interested and busy. It is an irregular, perpetual motion, without model and without aim. Its inventions excite, pursue, and produce one another. (818)
The poetic gait of critical thinking produces a sense of indeterminancy that keeps desire alive. As in the disjunctive rhetoric of the essay, the language of poetry translates the impossibility of producing a proper term. Apollo’s language violates the logic of reason and foregrounds ambiguity rather than a reduction of meaning.
A bit farther along in the text Montaigne advances the idea that the lack of a universal language makes the possibility of justice virtually impossible. For Montaigne our disputes are essentially linguistic controversies that cannot offer any determinate or real content for the realization of justice: “Nostre contestation est verbale… . La question est de parolles, et se paye de mesme” (III, 13, 1069) (“Our disputes are purely verbal… . The question is one of words, and is answered in the same way” [818]). The interpretation of laws produces even more laws, which proliferate meaning in a vertiginous hermenutic maze that mimetically represents one of the etymological meanings of the word “essai,” namely, experiri, to try something out: “Nous ouvrons la matiere et l’espandons en la destrempant; d’un subject nous en faisons mille, et retombons, en multipliant et subdivisant, à l’infinité des atomes d’Epicurus” (III, 13, 1067) (“By diluting the substance we allow it to escape and spill it all over the place; of one subject we make a thousand, and, multiplying and subdividing, fall back into Epicurus’infinity of atoms” [817]).
Montaigne, like Derrida, views the nature of the force of law as a phenomenon tied to its potentially deceptive quality and its status as an absolute entity:4 “Or les loix se maintiennent en credit, non par ce qu’elles sont justes, mais par ce qu’elles sont loix. C’est le fondement mystique de leur authorité; elles n’en ont poinct d’autre” (III, 13, 1072) (“Now laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority” [821]). The imposition of the law through acts of judgment, paradoxically subsumes difference in the name of justice. Far from being transcendent, the law must be thought of as something that cannot take place since in its practice the law is ultimately not a judgment but a non-lieu.
Montaigne’s essay foregrounds the disjunction between the singularity of a case and a principle of law:
Qu’ont gaigné nos legislateurs à choisir cent mille especes et faicts particuliers, et y attacher cent mille loix? Ce nombre n’a aucune proportion avec l’infinie diversité des actions humaines. La multiplication de nos inventions n’arrivera pas à la variation des exemples. Adjoustez y en cent fois autant: il n’adviendra pas pourtant que, des evenemens à venir, il s’en trouve aucun qui, en tout ce grand nombre de milliers d’evenemens choisis et enregistrez, en rencontre un auquel il se puisse joindre et apparier si exactement, qu’il n’y reste quelque circonstance et diversité qui requiere diverse consideration de jugement. (III, 13, 1066)
What have our legislators gained by selecting a hundred thousand particular cases and actions, and applying a hundred thousand laws to them? This number bears no proportion to the infinite diversity of human actions. Multiplication of our imaginary cases will never equal the variety of the real examples. Add to them a hundred times as many more: and still no future event will be found to correspond so exactly to any one of all the many, many thousands of selected and recorded events that there will not remain some circumstance, some difference, that will require separate consideration in forming a judgment. (815–16)
To be sure, the multiplicity of situations in which to judge forecloses the possibility of establishing a legal syntax that would always result in a justifiable end. If a judgment is to be equitable, it cannot be derived from the application of a universal metanarrative since a just judgment must foreground the singularity of what is being judged.
On donne authorité de loy à infinis docteurs, infinis arrests, et à autant d’interpretations. Trouvons nous pourtant quelque fin au besoin d’interpreter… . Nous obscurcissons et ensevelissons “intelligence” ; nous ne la descouvrons plus qu’à la mercy de tant de clostures et barrieres. (III, 13, 1068)
We give legal authority to numberless doctors, numberless decisions, and as many interpretations. Do we therefore find any end to the need of interpreting? … We obscure and bury the meaning; we no longer find it except hidden by so many enclosures and barriers. (817)
If, as Montaigne suggests, there is little interrelation among the variety of our actions, it is because the event through which a law is “read” is always unanticipated. From a legal standpoint the singularity of an event cannot be subjected to a horizon of intelligibility. No event is identical to another; the law cannot foresee the virtualities of that which is yet to come.
In Montaigne’s critique, the law is never quite transparent and the fulfillment of its claims—are not universal. According to the essayist, if the application of the law subjects itself to web of differences it is because the universalizing imperative of the law imposes totalizing effects that preclude singularities:
Pourquoy est-ce que nostre langage commun, si aisé à tout autre usage, devient obscur et non intelligible en contract et testament? … Car, en subdivisant ces subtilitez, on apprend aux hommes d’accroistre les doubtes; on nous met en trein d’estendre et diversifier les difficultez, on les alonge, on les disperse. (III, 13, 1115)
Why is it that our common language, so easy for any other use, becomes obscure and unintelligible in contracts and wills, … For by subdividing these subtleties they teach men to increase their doubts; they start us extending and diversifying the difficulties, they lengthen them, they scatter them. (816)
No longer regarded as that which clarifies, the application of the law is seen as a practice which engenders difference and produces doubt.
If, as has been suggested, justice is a discursive issue, Montaigne’s text foregrounds the arbitrary nature of the law and suggests that justice as law cannot be justice at all. To be sure, no longer viewing the law as a phenomenon founded on the power of reason, it ultimately finds itself subject to questions open to the interpretation of its meaning. Experience, predicated on the act of “essaying,” necessitates the questioning of the law’s validity; it engenders an encounter with alterity and produces an aporia between law and its so-called promise. The result ultimately undercuts the possibility of the law’s legitimation. The aporia of the law appears in the impossibility of writing a narrative that can account for what is to come since experience shares with the law the improprieties of chance. Despite the desire to differentiate, the law can never account for all eventualities.
The scopic and oral parameters of desire are represented in an anecdotal fragment drawn from Aesop that dramatizes the fatal attraction resulting from the pursuit of desire.5 In this story a pack of dogs desires to reach the body of a dead man on the other side of the shore. They consume the body of water that separates them from the corpse, thereby bringing about their demise. The desire of these canines can be read as a libidinal impulse that reveals itself as a paradoxical phenomenon. The energy produced by the need to satisfy desire brings about desire’s end. Might the very presence of the tale in this essay suggest that an excess of desire may lead to a loss of being, whereby desire ultimately erases the subject and marks a limit?
Montaigne’s epistemological critque has ontological consequences. The performative function of the essay is to question the artificial boundaries between inside and outside, as well as the authorizing modalities of the proper and the improper. As in my discussion of the quest for knowledge, experience as a textual practice cannot be guaranteed by a body of prescriptions: “La raison a tant de formes, que nous ne sçavons à laquelle nous prendre; l’experience n’en a pas moins” (III, 13, 1065) “Reason has so many shapes that we know not which to lay hold of; experience has no fewer” [815]). The very drive that constitutes desire precludes the possibility of imposing limits on knowledge, making the experience of being in the “here and now,” as Heidegger once claimed, completely ineffable. The result of this phenomenon suggests that there is no moment when we properly are:
Moy qui me vente d’embrasser si curieusement les commoditez de la vie, et si particulierement, n’y trouve, quand j’y regarde ainsi finement, à peu pres que du vent. Mais quoy, nous sommes par tout vent. Et le vent encore, plus sagement que nous, s’ayme à bruire, à s’agiter, et se contente en ses propres offices, sans desirer la stabilité, la solidité, qualitez non siennes. (III, 13, 1106 –7)
I, who boast of embracing the pleasures of life so assiduously and so particularly, find in them, when I look at them thus minutely, virtually nothing but wind. But what of it? We are all wind. And even the wind, more wisely than we, loves to make a noise and move about, and is content with its own functions, without wishing for stability and solidity, qualities that do not belong to it. (849)
Yet this very deficiency acquires a certain degree of exemplarity since it paradoxically transforms nothing into something, which suggests the symptom of our own vanity. Our faulty imagination creates the illusion that we are able to escape the ontological void of existence and pursue the impossible essence of things: “C’est signe de racourciment d’esprit quand il se contente, ou de lasseté. Nul esprit genereux ne s’arreste en soy: il pretend tousjours et va outre ses forces; il a des eslans au delà de ses effects; … son aliment c’est admiration, chasse, ambiguité” (III, 13, 1068) (“It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength… . Its pursuits are boundless and without form; its food is wonder, the chase, ambiguity” [817–18]). There is indeed an impulse within the mind’s “I” that seeks to transcend the void that is synonymous with the ontological condition of humankind. This passion for transgression enables the mind to nurture itself on the very emptinees it seeks to escape. Truth is something one can never arrive at; it never presents itself absolutely since it belongs to a domain beyond the provisional nature of knowledge. However, in the quest for truth one can still apprehend singular experiences: “Je ne sçay qu’en dire, mais il se sent par experience que tant d’interprétations dissipent la verité et la rompent” (III, 13, 1067) (“I do not know what to say about it, but it is evident from experience that so many interpretations disperse the truth and shatter it” [817]).
BODIES OF EXPERIENCE: MEDICINE AND THE LAW
In “De l’experience” knowledge based on experience renders scientific knowledge inadequate as a measure of “truth” in matters of the body. The specialized medical arts are divested of authority and treated with suspicion:
Les arts qui promettent de nous tenir le corps en santé et l’ame en santé, nous promettent beaucoup, mais aussi n’en est il point qui tiennent moins ce qu’elles promettent… . On peut dire d’eus pour le plus, qu’ils vendent les drogues medecinales; mais qu’ils soyent medecins, cela ne peut on dire. (III, 13, 1079)
The arts that promise to keep our body in health and our soul in health promise us much; but at the same time there are none that keep their promise less… . The most you can say for them is that they sell medicinal drugs; but that they are doctors you cannot say. (p. 827)]
Conceived as an overdetermined and formulaic science, medical discourse uncritically imposes definitions of health as disciplinary tools to which the body must conform. Instead of adhering to a system of medical taxonomies, the speaking body engages empirically with the passage of life, acquiring an exemplary value in its confrontation with self-knowledge: “Mon mestier et mon art, c’est vivre” (II, 6, 379) (“My trade and my art is living” [274]). A bad liturgical bedtime story of absolute health, medical science promises a cure based on the messianic advent of a scientific truth realized through nothing more than magical thinking. This infelicitous use of the imagination proposes general rules as a panecea for all cases of physical illness.
In opposition to doctrinal knowledge, which prescribes and rationalizes human biology through the invention of an abstract medical grammar, the experience of the body must be conceived of as a heuristic phenomenon capable of translating and measuring the vi cissitudes of human health based on corporeal sensation: “Je ne me juge que par vray sentiment, non par discours” (III, 13, 1095) (“I judge myself only by actual sensation, not by reasoning” [840]). This experiential process transforms the body into a subject of knowledge functioning independently of scientific fact. As Judith Butler would later suggest in her reading of Freud, the body is interchangeable with the ego6
Ainsi Platon avoit raison de dire que pour estre vray medecin, il seroit necessaire que celuy qui l’entreprendroit eust passé par toutes les maladies qu’il veut guarir et par tous les accidens et circonstances dequoy il doit juger. C’est raison qu’ils prennent la verole s’ils la veulent sçavoir penser. (III, 13, 1079)
So Plato was right in saying that to become a true doctor, the candidate must have passed through all the illnesses that he wants to cure and all the accidents and circumstances that he is to diagnose. It is reasonable that he should catch the pox if he wants to know how to treat it. (827)
For Montaigne it is necessary to think with the body in order to apprehend illness. Appearing to represent more authentic proximity to Being, the body also represents the possibility of the impossible: a thinking body whose signifying powers project an ontology of the corporeal. As it is transcribed by language, the body functions as a vital force that serves as a mediating ground. It is not an object of observation to be considered in relation to the formulas proposed by science; rather, it becomes the object of self-knowledge and the matter of experience itself.
As with Montaigne’s critique of the law, which foregrounds the disjunction between itself and its promise, medical discourse announces a determinism that cannot guaranteed the coincidence of the theoretical with its corporeal manifestations. Through its production of symptoms, the body detaches the name of an illness from what it is supposed to designate. Instead of confirming a universal medical principle, the symptom testifies to the singularity of the illness. In so doing, every symptom confirms the unrepeatablity of a corporeal experience, thereby excluding the body from categorization.
Nevertheless the body is not as autonomous as one might be led to believe. In a number of essays in the first book custom and habit foreground the body’s overdetermined character, suggesting that it is a socially constructed entity bearing the mark of culture. The body is modified both physically and within the imagination by such external forces.
For Montaigne the very idea of physical health is similarly a relative phenomenon. In “De l’experience” the discourse of anality— which I have described elsewhere as “excremental writing”7 — constitutes the fetishized object of health par excellence, in which the body metonymically represents the passage that is life. The alterity of the undissolved kidney stone translates in narrative form the decomposition that subsumes the body. It is played out metaphorically as an interior perception, a threat whose effect is corporeal pain: “C’est quelque grosse pierre qui foule et consomme la substance de mes roignons, et ma vie que je vuide peu à peu, non sans quelque naturelle douceur, comme un excrement hormais superflu et empeschant” (III, 13, 1095) (“It is some big stone that is crushing and consuming the substance of my kidneys, and my life that I am letting out little by little, not without some natural pleasure, as an excrement that is henceforth superfluous and a nuisance” [840]). By means of a curious reversal, the corporeal excretion of dead matter enables the human subject to give birth to a self that is no longer itself, for the emptying out of the other within the same enables the subject to speak. This self, which is constructed in what Montaigne calls “la matiere de mon livre” (“Au lecteur”) “the matter of my book” [2]), is but “des excremens d’un vieil esprit” (III, 9, 946) (“some excrements of an aged mind” [721]).
Although the body becomes the lens through which modalities of identification are viewed, the body in the text can only be mediated through language. The language in question, however, does not conceive of the body as a mirror. Ironically, language produces the body that it subsequently claims to find prior to the constitution of signification. Accordingly, the identification given to the subject through the sensations of the body is linguistically fleshed out. Blurring the distinction between the biological and the psychological, the entry into poetic language precipitates a “fading of Being,” suggesting that the embodiment of flesh is a tropological construction and not “natural” in any way. The represented body in this essay becomes a theater of passage, a space through which viscous liquids flow in the minutely depicted acts of urinating, defecating, and sweating. The speaking body dismembers itself in the act of essaying. Digestion and incorporation construct the self as a performative body that is the effect of the fiction of the digestive process as played out in the text.
RITES OF PASSAGE: FROM EVACUATION TO EJACULATION
The romance of the stone, the story of the passing of Montaigne’s kidney stone, constitutes a fusion of the aggressive and erotic satisfaction experience in the act of emptying out. The metaphor of the corporeal evacuation of the kidney stone resurfaces in “De l’experience” and functions as a commentary on that same topos in “De la res-semblance des enfans aux peres” (II, 37) (“Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers”). In the latter the biological body functions as a symbol of the fatal attachment to the father and the impetus to transcend it. Indeed, Pierre Eyquem has been marked by the illness of kidney stones and Michel, diminished by it, suffers as a victim of heredity. The real challenge will be to go beyond this “qualité pier-reuse” (II, 37, 763) (“petrifying quality” [592]) and disengage from the figure of the paternal body. Antoine Compagnon has suggested that Montaigne’s text envelops the name “Pierre” with symbolic mystery through homophonic and metaphoric iteration.8 It is this process that allows the figure of the son to partake in a family romance liberated from the biological constraints produced by heredity—beyond, that is, such a “qualité pierreuse”: “Il semble y avoir en la genealogie des Princes certains noms fatalement affectez” (I, 46, 276) (“Item, in the genealogy of princes there seem to be certain names earmarked by fate” [201]). By rendering an ontological matter a question of heredity and conceiving of it from a temporal perspective, the Montaignian text projects a geneological fatality and becomes the target of what might be described today as an oedipal drama:
Quel monstre est-ce, que cette goute de semence dequoy nous sommes produits, porte en soy les impressions, non de la forme corporelle seulement, mais des pensemens et des inclinations de nos peres? Cette goute d’eau, où loge elle ce nombre infiny de formes? Et comme portent-elles ces ressemblances, d’un progrez si temeraire et si desreglé que l’arriere fils respondra à son bisayeul, le neveu à l’oncle. (II, 37, 763)
What a prodigy it is that the drop of seed from which we are produced bears in itself the impressions not only of the bodily form but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers! Where does that drop of fluid lodge this infinite number of forms? And how do they convey these resemblances with so heedless and irregular a course that the great-grandson will correspond to his great-grandfather, the nephew to the uncle? (578)
The challenge to the fatality of heredity is here unmistakable: “Mon pere haïssoit toute sorte de sauces; je les aime toutes” (III, 13, 1102) (“My father hated all kinds of sauces; I love them all” [846]).
The experience of the body suggests the necessary relationship between suffering and pleasure as a phenomenon reflecting the fundamentally complex nature of human experience. The essay itself surpasses the empirical, for the representation of the self in its dynamic and contradictory energy can only be realized through the power of the imaginary as an “acte à un seul personnage” (III, 9, 979) (“an act for one single character” [748]), who processes and reconfigures the sensations of the body. As a writerly practice, experience marks the link between the body and the imagination; it enables the desire for knowledge to function as an opening for something to come, “quelque chose se passera.” This fable of omnipotence is one in which the physicality of the body, mediated by the figure of the stone, extends itself beyond the limits of its spatial constraints. What emerges in the essay is a rhetoric of empowerment based on the mode of the virtual as it is projected by the imagination: “Or je trete mon imagination le plus doucement que je puis et la deschargerois, si je pouvois, de toute peine et contestation. Il la faut secourir et flatter, et piper qui peut” (III, 13, 1090) (“Now I treat my imagination as gently as I can, and would relieve it, if I could, of all trouble and conflict. We must help it and flatter it, and fool it if we can” [836]). In this figural encounter the mind dispossesses the body. The care of the body becomes one of concern for the soul by allowing nature to partake of old age: “Il [the mind] dict que c’est pour mon mieux que j’ay la gravele: que les bastimens de mon aage ont naturellement à souffrir quelque goutiere” (III, 13, 1090) (“It tells me that it is for my own good that I have the stone; that buildings of my age must naturally suffer some leakage” [836]). Through the search for family resemblances between the body and a building of the same age, the mind’s eye conflates the contingency of the kidney stone with the necessity of a general law of aging. The imaginary associates the meaning of bodily decline with a highly aestheticized identification. In this manner, the material of bodily experience becomes locked in a crypt that transforms the human psyche, and ultimately immobilizes the body, as in sleep: “Par tels argumens, et forts et foibles, comme Cicero le mal de sa vieillesse, j’essaye d’endormir et amuser mon imagination et gresser ses playes. Si elles s’empirent demain, demain nous y pourvoyerons d’autres eschapatoires” (III, 13, 1095) (“By such arguments, both strong and weak, I try to lull and beguile my imagination and salve its wounds. If they get worse tomorrow, tomorrow we shall provide other ways of escape” [839])
The project of Montaigne’s narrative takes shape in the romance of the stone, whose reflexivity projects itself outside itself. The “gravelle” (kidney stone) representing the spectrality of the Father, prob-lematizes the ontological status of the self. In this context, the essayist enters into a relationship with death and mourning through a metaphor that motivates the return of the repressed. If psychanalytically inspired identification operates according to the exigencies of incorporation and introjection, then the image of the kidney stone as blockage is a metaphor of what is killing the essayist within.
The passage of what might be termed “the phallic stone” becomes the necessary movement for a renewed sense of tranquillity. The consequences of corporeal blockage challenge the natural inclinations of libidinal energy and multiply the threat of disengagement from objects of desire. The possible eclipse of the desiring subject is forestalled by a strategic move that disembodies the pain and engages in an agonistic relationship with the figure of the disease itself:
Je donne grande authorité à mes desirs et propensions. Je n’ayme point à guarir le mal par le mal; je hay les remedes qui importunent plus que la maladie. D’estre subject à la cholique et subject à m’abstenir du plaisir de manger des huitres, ce sont deux maux pour un. Le mal nous pinse d’un costé, la regle de l’autre. Puisque on est au hazard de se mesconter, hazardons nous plus-tost à la suitte du plaisir. (III, 13, 1086)
I give great authority to my desires and inclinations. I do not like to cure trouble by trouble; I hate remedies that are more nuisance than the disease. To be subjected to the stone and subjected to abstaining from the pleasure of eating oysters, those are two troubles for one. The disease pinches us on one side, the rule on the other. Since there is a risk of making a mistake, let us risk it rather in pursuit of pleasure. (832)
The refusal to inhibit the appetite that is desire facilitates the acceptance of the natural voluptuousness of life: “Pour moy donc, j’ayme la vie et la cultive telle qu’il a pleu à Dieu nous l’octroier… . On fait tort à ce grand et tout puissant donneur de refuser son don, l’annuller et desfigurer” (I, 13, 1113) (“As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it just as God has been pleased to grant it to us… . We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it” 854–55]). By evacuating the figure of the Father, the figure of the son may once again find satisfaction in the harmonious balance of body and mind and the cultivation of pleasure. The passage of the stone suggests an anteriority purged through the process of evacuation. It acquires an ethical dimension ironically consecrated by a Heavenly Father who has bequeathed life to us and who is perfection and fullness. The figure of the son can therefore eliminate the discomfort produced by the trace of the biological father.
Montaigne’s description of this drama furnishes a poetic compensation for loss whereby art regulates the infelicities of nature. Interestingly, this text, which represents the imagination’s drama, enables the body’s degeneration to overcome its discomfort as a result of the kidney stone and, through this projection, to engender a poetry of epic proportions. The text presents a stoic drama that makes thinking the impossible “real” through the imaginary work of the body:
On te voit suer d’ahan, pallir, rougir, trembler, vomir jusques au sang, souffrir des contractions et convulsions estranges, degouter par foys de grosses larmes des yeux, rendre les urines espesses, noires, et effroyables, ou les avoir arrestées par quelque pierre espineuse et herissée qui te pouinct et escorche cruellement le col de la verge. (III, 13, 1091)
They see you sweat in agony, turn pale, turn red, tremble, vomit your very blood, suffer strange contractions and convulsions, sometimes shed great tears from your eyes, discharge thick, black, and frightful urine, or have it stopped up by some sharp rough stone that cruelly pricks and flays the neck of your penis. (836 –37)
The desire to engage in magical thinking through the power of the imagination creates an exceptional situation in which the figure of thought transcends the constraints of life’s limitations: “Mon esprit est propre à ce service: il n’a point faute d’apparences par tout; s’il persuadoit comme il presche, il me secourroit heureusement” (III, 13, 1090) “My mind is suited to this service; it has no lack of plausible reasons for all things. If it could persuade as well as it preaches, it would help me out very happily” [836]).
The text produces a drama in which the subject is represented through a dialogic interplay between second- and third-person discourse that translates showing through saying. Implicated in this drama is a reader-spectator whose gaze bears witness to the theatrical performance that is played out by the essayist as “metteur en scène.” Here the figure of the essayist acquires a kind of omnipotence through the “playing out” of multiple roles. With this strategy of magical thinking, one may conceive of this rhetorical drama as the coming into being of contingency. Despite the multiple references the text makes to the ontological void within the self, this rhetorical maneuver permits the figure of the essayist—at least momentarily—to enjoy the illusory plenitude resulting from this sense of omnipotence.
In this passage the doubling of the self—the relation between the figure of the essayist and his other—enables the human body to attain a heroic level. Through this rhetorical mise-en-scène a simulation of the self emerges, predicated on forgetting that may be the result of learning to live with what one cannot avoid: “Il faut apprendre à souffrir ce qu’on ne peut eviter” (III, 13, 1089) (“We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid” [835]). The double represents what Freud once described as “an insurance against the destructon of the ego.”9
If the drama of the passage of the stone is to be successful and offer a sense of peace, the representation of the self must, through the process of prosopopoeia, engage in a dialogic process that paradoxically foregrounds the imagination and functions as a textual conceit. In the following passage prosopopoeia gives a human voice to that which does not have one and suggests, through this image, how the subject puts into question the “I” as a self-identical entity:
Or je trete mon imagination le plus doucement que je puis et la deschargerois, si je pouvois, de toute peine et contestation. Il la faut secourir et flatter, et piper qui peut. Mon esprit est propre à ce service: il n’a point faute d’apparences par tout; s’il persuadoit comme il presche, il me secourroit heureusement. (III, 13, 1090)
Now I treat my imagination as gently as I can, and would relieve it, if I could, of all trouble and conflict. We must help it and flatter it, and fool it if we can. My mind is suited to this service; it has no lack of plausible reasons for all things. If it could persuade as well as it preaches, it would help me out very happily. (836)
This anthropomorphic representation allows fear to foreclose on affect’s movement, permitting the desiring albeit mortal subject to attain the state it needs: “Je la [life] jouys au double … du plus ou moins d’application que nous y prestons” (III, 13, 1111) (“I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it” [853]).
In order to recover the pleasure threatened by the unassimilable difference that is the kidney stone, the subject in pain must excrete the foreign matter through the imagination’s ability to bring desire to fruition. The narration of corporeal pain gives birth to the felicitous consequences of a fabulous imagination:
Mais est-il rien doux au pris de cette soudaine mutation, quand d’une douleur extreme je viens, par le vuidange de ma pierre, à recouvrer comme d’un esclair la belle lumiere de la santé, si libre et si pleine, comme il advient en nos soudaines et plus aspres choliques? Y a il rien en cette douleur soufferte qu’on puisse con-trepoiser au plaisir d’un si prompt amandement? De combien la santé me semble plus belle apres la maladie, si voisine et si con-tigue que je les puis recognoistre en presence l’une de l’autre en leur plus haut appareil, où elles se mettent à l’envy, comme pour se faire teste et contrecarre! (III, 13, 1093)
But is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens in our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic? Is there anything in this pain we suffer that can be said to counterbalance the pleasure of such sudden improvement? How much more beautiful health seems to me after the illness, when they are so near and contiguous that I can recognize them in each other’s presence in their proudest array, when they vie with each other, as if to oppose each other squarely! (838)
In the context of this drama, Montaigne’s essay blurs the parameters of the pleasure-pain opposition, a metamorphosis of pain into pleasure, and vice versa. The excitement elicited by pain in the romance of the stone functions in the service of an evacuatory “end pleasure” that leads Montaigne from evacuation to ejaculation. By conjoining the metaphor of light with pleasure, the text demonstrates how vision becomes a trope for good health. Accordingly, light acquires a privileged status as a signifier of the soul.
In the romance of the stone one witnesses the sexualization of pain through the power of the imagination. The representation of pleasure in the practice of the self-portraiture translates the experience of the body’s vulnerability. Nevertheless, the trope of the stoic mask, inscribed in this rhetorical drama, suggests how imagination, far beyond the power of reason, can construct an image of the body as the signifier of desire: “Et puis, combien est-ce de contenter la fan-tasie! A mon opinion cette piece là importe de tout, aumoins au delà de toute autre. Les plus griefs et ordinaires maux sont ceux que la fantasie nous charge” (III, 13, 1087) “And then how much it is to satisfy the imagination! In my opinion that faculty is all-important, at least more important than any other. The most grievous and ordinary troubles are those that fancy loads upon us” [833]).
The drama of the kidney stone creates a crossing over of aggressive and erotic satisfaction in the act of emptying out, such that a continuity is established between pain and the body’s libidinal energy. The body, represented as engaged in a performative function, dismembers itself in the act of narration and engages in a process that challenges the limit between inside and outside. The language of the text mirrors an ontological possibility that the writing subject wishes to enact. In the syntax of the fable, pain is metonymically related to masochistic pleasure through a reference to Socrates’ itchy legs:
Lors que Socrates, apres qu’on l’eust deschargé de ses fers, sentit la friandise de cette demangeson que leur pesanteur avoit causé en ses jambes, il se resjouyt à considerer l’estroitte alliance de la douleur à la volupté, comme elles sont associées d’une liaison necessaire, si qu’à tours elles se suyvent et s’entrengendrent. (III, 13, 1093)
When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure, how they are associated by a necessary link, so that they follow and engender each other in turn. (838)
Like the relationship of the stone to Montaigne’s aging body, the removal of the chains in which Socrates was imprisoned suggests that submission to the infelicities of corporeal decline eventually produces erotic delight. In this context, sexuality is depicted as the effect of the body’s exercise in power over the imagination and the paradoxical logic behind the act of writing. Medically speaking the “gravelle” can produce impotence, but the passage of the stone imparts to the desiring subject a second life and a transcendence of “la maladie pierreuse.”
In passing from what Jules Brody has described as the “degree zero” of pain to the relief produced by the removal of the chains, the text suggests the pleasure associated with masochism and the narcissistic delight derived from displeasure.10 The emergence of pleasure results from a certain fragmentation of the imaginary coherence of the body and a challenging of its boundaries. Montaigne’s text creates a paradoxical relationship between pain and pleasure and the realization of fuller vitality. The way toward a greater access to desire passes by way of the de-sedimentation of the body, which ascribes to the illness an exemplary function. Like the sex act itself, the passage of the stone dramatizes a deathlike experience involving the loss of self, whereby the symbolic expenditure of dead matter paradoxically leads to a continuation of life. The logic of what the French call “le petit mort” recapitulates the previously discussed excremental logic.
The romance of the stone thus encapsulates a certain ironic burden toward change and a call to live on the edge, to will a little pain in order to encounter pleasure: “ Mes reins ont duré un aage sans alteration; il y en a tantost un autre qu’ils ont changé d’estat. Les maux ont leur periode comme les biens; à l’avanture est cet accident à sa fin” (III, 13, 1093) (“My kidneys lasted an age without weakening; it will soon be another age since their condition changed. Evils have their period like good things; perhaps this ailment is coming to an end” [838]). Viewed as an allegory, the text depicts a way of confronting life so that it can support the most extreme intensities as a hankering to taste (“essay”) the diversity of the human experience.
It is interesting to consider the romance of the stone in what might be described as one of a series of details regarding Montaigne’s daily life. In the narrative of the fallen tooth, realized through the to-pos of the disjecta membra, the present is fractured as it is described metaphorically in the testimony of the remainder. The writer is put in the position of a fallen present and removed from the illusory fullness of the past: “Voilà une dent qui me vient de choir, sans douleur, sans effort: c’estoit le terme naturel de sa durée. Et cette partie de mon estre et plusieurs autres sont desjà mortes, … des plus actives et qui tenoient le premier rang pendant la vigueur de mon aage” (III, 13, 1101) (“Here is a tooth that has just fallen out, without pain, without effort; that was the natural term of its duration. Both that part of my being and several others are already dead, others half dead, even some of the most active, which held the highest rank in my vigorous prime” [845]). The extruded kidney stones, like the fallen tooth, function as emblems of the reality of death. The body in decomposition paradoxically becomes a life-giving force in the very process of decline. The spectrality of the figure of the corpse projects itself onto the trope of the body and thus enables life and death to intersect and dissipate simultaneously: “La mort se mesle et confond par tout à nostre vie“ (III, 13, 1102) (“Death mingles and fuses with our life throughout” [846]). Haunted by the impersonality of death, the “I” had been contaminated by the impurity of the excremental matter. The narrative of the fallen tooth can only be realized within a context that restricts the impact of loss and reconceives it as a synecdochic process: “Quelle bestise sera-ce à mon entendement de sentir le saut de cette cheute, desjà si avancée, comme si elle estoit entiere? Je ne l’espere pas” (III, 13, 1101–2) (“How stupid it would be of my mind if it were to feel the last leap of this decline, which is already so far advanced, as acutely as if it were the whole fall. I hope this will not happen” [845]). Here, somewhat magically, the imagination triumphs, This narrative puts death in its place and rescues it from indifference.
The poetry of difference through which the romance of the stone is transcribed suggests that the desire to accept life as it is in each separate but discrete moment as it is represented in the disjunctive nature of Montaigne’s life narrative. The ontological impossibility of plenitude maintains the energy of desire and permits a coming to terms with the oxymoronic and fractured nature of existence. Desire, exercised through the power of the imagination, enables the reinvigoration of life, with enjoyment depending on the attention we lend to it. If pleasure is something that is allowed to take shape freely, it is because desire inhabits a space that prevents satisfaction from bringing the self into its own. “Les autres sentent la douceur d’un con-tentement et de la prosperité; je la sens ainsi qu’eux, mais ce n’est pas en passant et glissant” (III, 13, 1112) (“Others feel the sweetness of some satisfaction and of prosperity; I feel it as they do, but it is not in passing and slipping by” [854]).
THE SOCRATIC OTHER
Why does Montaigne’s essay conclude with a critique of Socrates? To be sure, in Plato’s Symposium Socrates is an enigma in matters of love.11 He is angered by Alcibiade’s homoerotic behavior yet admits that he is attracted to him. In his Memorabilia Xenophon, who claims to possess a certain degree of intimacy with Socrates, insists that this satyrlike creature was conflicted and accordingly was forced to choose celibacy.12 He not only exercised strict self-control where libidinal drives were concerned but also demanded that absolute restraint be observed with respect to the pleasure he experienced with “the Beautiful Ones.” Socrates is here depicted as an enemy of sexual pleasure who appropriates for himself a particularly atypical Hellenic stance in matters of love.
Socrates chooses to become the victim of a self-imposed sexual blindness by subscribing to the logic of reason self. However, it is the very force of reason and the abstinence before the menacing power of libidinal drives that ultimately lead to the negation of desire. Montaigne’s text suggests that Socrates’ demon functions as the figure of an unhappy consciousness that undercuts the pleasure principle and suppresses libidinal impulses:
C’est folie!: au lieu de se transformer en anges, ils se transforment en bestes; au lieu de se hausser, ils s’abattent. Ces humeurs transcendentes m’effrayent, comme les lieux hautains et inaccessibles; et rien ne m’est à digerer fascheux en la vie de Socrates que ses ecstases et ses demoneries, rien si humain en Platon que ce pourquoy ils disent qu’on l’appelle divin. (III, 13, 1115)
That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me, like lofty and inaccessible places; and nothing is so hard for me to stomach in the life of Socrates as his ecstasies and possessions by his daemon, nothing is so human in Plato as the qualities for which they say he is called divine. (856)
Throughout this essay desire is represented by tropes of appetite, by analogy with hunger and thirst. In this respect, like the ancient Athenians it depicts a longing for a desired object. What Socrates experiences, according to Montaigne, is eros and not philia., The paralyzing effect of Socrates’s inner voice forecloses the possibility of erotic engagement.
Montaigne’s description of Socrates’denial stands in contradistinction to the choreographics of desire depicted in this essay, where the body’s needs are represented as succumbing to the magical thinking of the mind’s desire. Here Socrates’ resistance to eroticism excludes him from the community of lovers. Adherence to a higher principle ironically transforms the quest for perfection into the possibility of corporeal pleasure and the suppression of the human. Montaigne’s text suggests that the acceptance of the instinctive drives within the self, through the process of experience, might erase the distinction between the divine and its diametrical opposite. Socrates’attempt to reject the human allows him to believe that he can contain within the self what he perceives as menacing. Once Socrates has constructed an image of an ethical life, he remains imprisoned within a fantasy that leads him astray. Montaigne’s reference to Socrates’s dilemma enables us to see that if we are able to go beyond the boundaries of self-imposed limitations, through the coming to terms with self-knowledge, we might in fact achieve a sense of tranquillity in accepting the contingencies of life.
By granting access to the erotic, Montaigne’s text foregrounds the hospitality that Plato considers the soul of philosophical engagement. Recall that the oracle at Delphi named Socrates the wisest of men to the extent that he knew the nature of his ignorance. In a way, Montaigne anticipates Nietzsche, who describes how morality turns against us and redirects it against ourselves. Within this context, the constitution of the Socratic subject is realized in terms of regulation. However, this ethical regulation of bodily impulse, motivated by the power of the demonic, is itself a desiring activity. In order to engage in the miscognition of self-knowledge, the Socratic subject sublates difference into sameness. This ontological move is regarded as a denial of difference. Transcendence as a strategy of concealment projects a fictive self- identifical subject that becomes, in fact, other than itself. Perhaps the Montaignian commentary on the inner voice of Socrates is meant to demystify the role of his personal demons as a measure of truth warning against an improper act. This critique of Socrates’ demons enables the discovery of a possibility, an openness to the corporeal pleasures of life. They are motivated from within the mind’s deeper strata, which is so far from reason that it might paradoxically constitute sanity itself.
Unlike Socrates, who performs sublation before all earthly forms in the name of an abstract ideal, the essayist appropriates the positon of Alcibiades as a counterexample in his refusal to look away from the world and reject the metaphysical explanation concerning the death of desire: “J’en suis là comme Alcibiades, que je ne me rep-resenteray jamais, que je puisse, à homme qui decide de ma teste, où mon honneur et ma vie depende de l’industrie et soing de mon procureur plus que de mon innocence” (III, 13, 1071) (“My position, like that of Alcibiades, is this: I shall never turn myself over, if I can help it, to a man who can dispose of my head, where my honor and my life depend on the skill and diligence of my attorney more than on my innocence” [820]). The implied reference here is to Socrates’s trial, where the philosopher chose imprisonment and death in the name of a higher form of virtue before the accusation of having corrupted youth. Alcibiades, known for his insolent behavior and lawlessness, conversely finds liberty in transgressive behavior. Accused of a plan to overthrow Athenian democracy, he surreptitiously escaped judgment and fled to Sparta, where he betrayed Athens’military secrets and was tried in absentia. Montaigne’s trial (“essai”) becomes the work of the essay, whereby the essayist shall become Socrates perfected.
As Kaja Silverman has suggested in her analysis of Plato’s Symposium, the experience of the lover, as exemplified by the figure of Socrates, undergoes a process of “deindividuation” whereby the “non-sensory spectacle of the Beautiful subjects” commits desire to plenitude by the “negation of phenomenal forms.”13 Socrates’ self-imprisonment is the result of becoming one with an ideal that he describes as “wholly perfect and free of all troubles.” Unlike Socrates, Alcibiades takes pleasure in not satisfying the desire Plato described in the Republic as a boundless ambition to manage affairs and Thucydides referred to as an insatiable need for prestige. Ironically, the essayist who describes himself as “encore vierge de procés” (III, 10, 1017) (“till virgin of lawsuits” [779]) remains committed to the trial that is the essay and yet paradoxically passes judgment on Socrates of what must be: “Ce que Socrates feit sur sa fin, d’estimer une sentence d’exil pire qu’une sentence de mort, contre soy, je ne seray, à mon advis, jamais ny si cassé ny si estroitement habitué en mon païs et je le feisse” (III, 9, 973) (“What Socrates did near the end of his life, in considering a sentence of exile against him worse than a sentence of death, I shall never, I think, be so broken or so strictly attached to my own country as to do” [743]). For the claustrophobia derived from the imprisonment in a place that is one—“tant de gens clouez à un quartier de ce royaume” (III, 13, 1072) (“so many people, nailed down to one section of this kingdom” [821])—motivates the desire to effect a distanciation and foreclose on the possibility of a rule of law declaring what we “properly” are. Like Alcibiades, the figure of the essayist engages in an openness of being: “Si celles [the laws] que je sers me menassoient seulement le bout du doigt, je m’en irois incontinent en trouver d’autres, où que ce fut” (III, 13, 1072) (“If those that I serve threatened even the tip of my finger, I should instantly go and find others, wherever it might be” [821]). Interestingly, being unable to reject the cultivation of the body, the Montaignian subject engages in a more exemplary wisdom than that of Socrates: “Moy, qui ne manie que terre à terre, hay cette inhumaine sapience qui nous veut rendre desdaigneux et ennemis de la culture du corps” (III, 13, 1106) (“I, who operate only close to the ground, hate that inhuman wisdom that would make us disdainful enemies of the cultivation of the body” [849]).
To be sure, the essay suggests that nature is anything but normative. By welcoming the irregularities of the rhythm of life, Montaigne is able to be “at home” in difference. The essayist shows us that the impossibility of life follows the impossible logic of hospitality, becoming both “hote” (host) and “hote” (guest). Montaigne nevertheless shows us that by accepting this impossible logic, one is able to imagine the experience of life:
J’ay pris, comme j’ay dict ailleurs, bien simplement et cruement pour mon regard ce precepte ancien: que nous ne sçaurions faillir à suivre nature, que le souverain precepte c’est de se conformer à elle. Je n’ay pas corrigé, comme Socrates, par force de la raison mes complexions naturelles, et n’ay aucunement troublé par art mon inclination. Je me laisse aller, comme je suis venu. (III, 12, 1059)
As I have said elsewhere, I have very simply and crudely adopted for my own sake this ancient precept: that we cannot go wrong by following Nature, that the sovereign precept is to conform to her. I have not, like Socrates, corrected my natural disposition by force of reason, and have not troubled my inclination at all by art. I let myself go as I have come. (811)
By interrogating the truths of Socrates, Montaigne’s text opts for the nobler engagement with the human in place of the divine. In Plato’s Republic those who engage in the quest for pleasure inhabit the so-called city of pigs, and in the Symposium bodily pleasure is described by Socrates as animalistic and “of no account.” On the contrary, for Montaigne the physical side of existence, based on the sensations of experiential knowledge, derives from the desire to “know thyself” even in what may be perceived as the most unappealing of bodily functions: “Et au plus eslevé throne du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul” (III, 13, 1115) (“And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump” [857]). In this essay the corporeal and the spiritual converge and demonstrate that pleasure—“intellectuellement sensible et sensiblement intellectuel” (III, 13, 1107)(“intellectually sensual, sensually intellectual” [850]) —can permeate all aspects of life as it warns against ignoring the stirrings of the body: “Je hay qu’on nous ordonne d’avoir l’esprit aus nues, pendant que nous avons le corps à table” (III, 13, 1107) (“I hate to have people order us to keep our minds in the clouds while our bodies are at table” [850]).
In the course of the essay a particularly pertinent reference is made in which the essayist compares himself to the character Quartillia in Petronius’s Satyricon.14 Here the text brings Montaigne into contact with an earlier self for whom desire is the result of a fatal attraction:
Et me suis jeune … presté autant licentieusement et inconsideréement qu’autre au desir qui me tenoit saisi… . Il y a du malheur certes, et du miracle, à confesser en quelle foiblesse d’ans je me rencontray premierement en sa subjection. Ce fut bien rencontre, car ce fut long temps avant l’aage de choix et de cognoissance. Il ne me souvient point de moy de si loing. Et peut on marier ma fortune à celle de Quartilla, qui n’avoit point memoire de son fillage. (III, 13, 1087)
I lent myself as licentiously and thoughtlessly as any other man to the desire that held me in its grip… . It is certainly distressing and miraculous to confess at what a tender age I first chanced to fall under its subjection. It was indeed by chance, for it was long before the age of choice and knowledge. I do not remember about myself so far back. And my lot may be coupled with that of Quartilla, who had no memory of her maidenhood. (833)
Priestess of Priapus, the phallic god, Quartilla had an erotic appetite so unlimited that she could not remember a time when she had been a virgin. In the section of the Satyricon that deals with the exploits of Quartilla one learns that Encolpius and his companions are accused by Quartilla of illegally observing the rites of Priapus. The temple of Priapus, where Quartilla reigns, is the place where such violent sexual rituals as sodomy are performed. Ironically, the punishment of the two young protagonists makes them become the object of what they had secretly observed. Anally raped by a Priapus figure, they find pleasure in their pain only when the object of aggression is withdrawn just prior to sexual climax, thereby frustrating the Priapus figure and the boys alike.
What emerges in Petronius’s tales is the manner in which sexuality is controlled by a dominant female figure whose insatiable desire is projected onto effeminate men and the Priapus figure alike. As in Plato’s Symposium, the Quartilla episode in the Satyricon is organized around a banqueting scene. In the context of the latter, a male prostitute enters the house and chants:
Come hither, come hither, you faggots so frisky,
Come running, come prancing,
come skipping here briskly;
Come bring your soft thighs, agile bottoms, lewd hands
Your flaccid old eunuch from Delian land.
Inhabiting the island of Delos, Apollo is here associated with castration because of his support of doctors. Under Apollo’s guidance, it is suggested, a male subject emerges who is impaired, and viewed as other. Dating back to Assyrian law (1300 –1100 B.C.E. ), the sodomized male was often associated with eunuchs. The sodomite’s sexuality, was punished by castration, thereby rendering subjectivity as the consequence of a missing part.
The figure of Quartilla acts as a reference point whereby male sexuality and passivity conjoin with an omnipotent female, who herself becomes a phallic other. Quartilla may lack the penis, but she is indeed in possession of the phallus, both figuratively and literally. Quartilla’s signature is imprinted on the male body and functions as a coitus interuptus that cannot be forgotten. This is achieved not through fulfillment but rather through interruption, of lack of fulfillment. The incompletion of the corporeal act might be conceived as haunting the body with a promise of a new sexual image. Beginning not with plenitude but with loss, fantasy, which Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis describe as an “imaginary scene […] representing the fulfillment of a wish,”15 offers the promise of an other that one might become. However, the sacrifice of male sexuality here is one that cannot be mourned; it precludes subject formation and leaves an indelible corporeal scar.
In order to disavow the loss of passionate attachments, the subject is constituted by a free-floating desire that is destined never to be fulfilled. The Priapus figure as well as these victims of homoerotic violence are psychically subjugated as a result of loss. The loss of the same-sex object precludes the very possibility of overcoming mourning. By averting the danger of sustained sexual experience, the coitus interruptus in Petronius’s narrative defers the satisfaction of the desiring subject. The present absence of the love object is paradoxically necessary for keeping desire in play.
Through its rhetorical acrobatics Montaigne’s text engages in modalities of identification in which sexuality is figured as a phenomenon whose borders remain in flux. The mobility of desire produces a series of identifications that undermine the possibility of assigning definition to questions of gender. Through the reference to Quartillia there is an identification with the figure of a non-identical subject. In a way, by marrying his fortune to that of Quartilla Montaigne, like Aristophanes in the Symposium, foregrounds the myth that humans were composed of three sexes: male, female, and male-female. Acccording to Aristophanes, humans were split into halves; for him eros reflected the desire to reconstitute that broken whole. For Aristophanes, however, if this longing were to be satisfied, the erotic would disappear. Eros, therefore, is the desire for what we lack.
In the Quartilla narrative Montaigne suggests a manner of being in which alterity cannot be domesticated. In linking his fate to that of Quartilla, the essayist identifies with a woman who acts like a man and is responsible for the deflowering of young men. Having situated himself under the sign of female desire, he also places himself in an endless quest of it. Quartilla’s insatiable desire is projected onto these young men, who become subjugated to a sexuality that is motivated as much by excess as it is by lack. Quartilla represents sexual difference, which males both lack and possess; she is capable of inflicting a punishment whose term knows no end. In assuming the function of a feminized phallus, Quartilla acts for the essayist as the signifier of a fatal attraction.
Interestingly, the Quartilla reference in Montaigne’s text is followed by a quote from an epigram by the Latin poet Martial that relates some homoerotic fantasies: “Hence goatish smells, precocious hair / A beard to make my mother stare.” The Martial quote is transcribed with an important modification; a significant portion of the epigram is truncated when it is inscribed in the essay. In transposing these lines from Martial’s epigram, Montaigne adds the personal pronoun “mae,” which Floyd Gray sees as “diverting it from its original homosexual content … to refer to his own sexual, presumably heterosexual precociousness.”16
The beard that makes the mother marvel—presumably Montaigne’s, since there is a shift in the use of the personal pronoun in the essay—points to the consequences of a fatal act, like the one imposed on Quartilla and which she subsequently inflicted on adolescents. The truncated quote from Martial’s epigram in Montaigne’s essay circumscribes the question of homoerotic desire. In the case of the Quartilla narrative and in the truncated epigram from Martial masculinity is not defined in opposition to heterosexual love. On the contrary, the boy described in Martial’s text realizes his manhood, a difference within the order of the same, as the result of the touch of another man’s hand. Manliness is not necessarily an outgrowth of heterosexual desire and it is not something that is overdetermined by sexual preference:
That you rub snow-white Galaesus’s soft skin with your hard mouth, that you lie with naked Ganymede—it’s too much, who denies it? But let it be enough. Refrain at least from stirring their groins with your fornicating hand. Where smooth boys are concerned, the hand is a worse offender than the cock; fingers make and precipitate manhood. Hence come the goat and rapid hairs and a beard to make a mother marvel, hence baths in broad daylight displease. Nature divided the male: one part was created for girls, one part for men. Use your part.17
If manhood (figured in the images of a goatlike odor and facial hair) can be viewed as the consequence of touching, it is because it represents the possibility of a different relation to sameness. The ellipses in Montaigne’s text suggest that homoerotic desire can acquire equanimity with heteroeroticism. Martial’s text suggests an otherness that cannot be reduced to the alterity of another person. Nature may have “divided the male,” but it has done so by challenging the distinction between sameness and difference. Accordingly, by inscribing homoerotic desire within the order of nature, what might be perceived as the realm of the improper becomes utterly proper. To be sure, sexual preference is more than a social differential: “Je la sçauray assez quand je la sentiray.” (III, 13, 1073) “I shall know it well enough when I feel it” [821]). As in Montaigne’s text, an image emerges in which the imagination allows the body to speak desire and in the process reveal both the collapse and the maintenance of distinctions.
In a way both Petronius’s and Martial’s texts mirror Montaigne’s in its disavowal of the absoluteness of identity. It acknowledges, through suggestion, the ability of the mind to imagine other forms of pleasure by transforming how sexuality has been known. Through these intertextual references, categories such as man, woman, male, and female, are destabilized. This process suggests that the relationship between sexual preference and gender has no permanent ground. The signs of gender cannot be constrained by the imposition of convention. Beyond that, through these references Montaigne’s text reveals how in the course of the essay sex and gender are discursively constructed and challenge the idea of manliness. As in the case of the rhetorical drama constituting the romance of the stone, identity is contingent and subject to the discursive performance that challenges ontologically petrified representations of the self: “La plus part de nos vacations sont farcesques. ‘Mundus universus exercet histrionam’ Il faut jouer deuement nostre rolle, mais comme rolle d’un personnage emprunté (III, 10, 1011) (“Most of our occupations are low comedy. The whole world plays a part [Petronius]. We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character” [773]).
To be sure, the essay on experience is about eroticism and narcissistic delight in the abandonment of the self to life as it unravels in all its inconsistencies. The Horatian text that signals the end of the essay is a prayer to the god Apollo that seeks comfort in the language of poetry. Apollo, god of music, poetry, science and philosophy, also has a role as the god of healing. In Greek culture Sophia (wisdom) refers to rhetorical skill; for the sophist, wisdom was associated with poetry, and it was separate from what Montaigne later referred to as science. In Plato’s Republic the notion of philos eros, unlike erotic pursuit and capture, includes intellectual intercourse to produce “intelligence and truth.” However, the truth that the intelligence puts in play in Montaigne’s essay suggests that the imagination lies at the heart of human experience and that the body enables the human subject to give birth to sensations upon which the drives of the imagination may work. Moreover, the language of poetry reflects its inability to formulate the proper; it points to an ungroundedness whereby a subject can only become a subject through the alterity that sets desire in motion. The language of poetry referred to in this essay constitutes what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has described as an “an upsetting relation to what is upset, in being, in the direction of no- thingness.”18 Montaigne writes: “Le poete, dict Platon, assis sur le trepied des Muses, verse de furie tout ce qui luy vient en la bouche … et luy eschappe des choses de diverse couleur, de contraire substance et d’un cours rompu” (III, 9, 995) (“The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, … and from him escape things of different colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow” [761]). Montaigne’s essay engenders a poetry of everyday life even in its banalities that seeks to find pleasure in the art of experience.
If, as has been suggested, the essay reflects an entry into poetic language, it is because the rhythm of the text precipitates a “fading of being” described earlier by Montaigne as a “condition mixte”: “C’est une absolue perfection, et comme divine, de scavoyr jouyr loiallement de son estre” (III, 13, 1115) (“It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully” [857]). Could the desire to accept life in the singularity of each moment be an oblique reference to the need to transcend absolutism in order to come to terms with the oxymoronic nature of human existence?
Je ne vay pas desirant qu’elle eust à dire la necessité de boire et de manger, et me sembleroit faillir non moins excusablement de desirer qu’elle l’eut double (“sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus”), ny que nous nous sustentissions mettant seulement en la bouche un peu de cette drogue par laquelle Epimenides se privoit d’appetit et se maintenoit, ny qu’on produisit stupidement des enfans par les doigts ou par les talons, ains, parlant en reverence, plus tost qu’on les produise encore voluptueusement par les doigts et par les talons, ny que le corps fut sans desir et sans chatouillement. Ce sont plaintes ingrates et iniques. J’accepte de bon coeur, et recognoissant, ce que nature a faict pour moy, et m’en agrée et m’en loue. (III, 13, 1113)
I do not go about wishing that it should lack the need to eat and drink, and it would seem to me no less excusable a failing to wish that need to be doubled. The wise man is the keenest searcher for natural treasures [Seneca]. Nor do I wish that we should sustain ourselves by merely putting into our mouths a little of that drug by which Epimenides took away his appetite and kept himself alive; nor that we should beget children insensibly with our fingers or our heels, but rather, with due respect, that we could also beget them voluptuously with our fingers and heels; nor that the body should be without desire and without titillation. Those are ungrateful and unfair complaints. I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. (854–55)
To be sure, to follow what nature has given us is to taste the variety of life by engaging in the art of experience. The symptom of what was previously described as “universal diversity” may be found in the differences within the self, which in the practice of the essay acquires a certain exemplarity.
At the end of Seminar VII Lacan proposes an ethics contrary to what has traditionally been thought of as the moral life, one that was anticipated by Montaigne. Like the essayist, Lacan suggests that it is through desire rather than its denial that humans may acquire virtue by conjoining the erotic with the ethical: “The only thing of which one can be guilty is having given ground relative to one’s desire”.19
Montaigne’s text suggests that access to the so-called authenticity of being is an impossibility. Since the self is always already in the process of becoming, it remains diametrically opposed to Platonic metaphysics. In this context, wisdom can only be derived from the variety of experiences and the multiple ways in which we conduct our lives: “Composer nos meurs est nostre office, non pas composer des livres, et gaigner, non pas des batailles et provinces, mais l’ordre et tranquil-lité à notre conduite” (III, 13, 1108) (“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct” [850 –51]).
As in the practice of the essay itself, Montaigne’s text foregrounds the corporeal metaphor of taste, a synecdochic representation of bodily functions, which acts as an invitation to partake of the banquet that is the instability of life: “J’ay assez vescu, pour mettre en compte l’usage qui m’a conduict si loing. Pour qui en voudra gouster, j’en ay faict l’essay, son eschançon (III, 13, 1080) (“I have lived long enough to give an account of the practice that has guided me so far. For anyone who wants to try it I have tasted it like his cupbearer” [827]). To be sure, the archaeology of the text shapes “experience” as a multiplicity of textual commentaries that are repeated and turned against themselves in much the same way that the multiple “Socrates” figures in Plato’s texts move through a variety of sites that ultimately undercut the logic of institutionalized “Platonism.” The act of essaying thus paradoxically de-subjugates subjectivity and in the process transcribes an alterity in which the so-called singularity of the natural is overcome. In the writing of the essay the text engages with the philosophical, which in the end becomes a responsibility exceeding the constraints of scientific knowledge.