Literature begins at the moment that literature becomes
a question.
MAURICE BLANCHOT
Act so that there is no use in a center.
GERTRUDE STEIN
It has often been said that the French think too much and that they have invented a theory for almost everything. Montaigne represents the beginning of a philosophical tradition in French letters in which ontological and epistemological concerns intersect. In his exploration of the self Montaigne poses the same questions that Socrates posed in antiquity and that modern psychoanalysis had adapted: How shall I live? How can I know myself? By posing these questions Montaigne, like Socrates before him, sought to explore the unexamined life independently of what one might refer to today as the normative constraints of what it means to know.
Montaigne was the first thinker in the Western tradition to explore human subjectivity in a profound way. In exploring the self, Montaigne’s Essays ( Essais ) reflect vital concerns that continue to haunt us today: what it means to exist and to follow nature; monsters, nightmares, and traumatic memories; fear of impotence and the fragility of gender; coping with the death of loved ones and the anticipation of one’s own death; thoughts about the future and of what one leaves behind; and mimicry as a tactic of diversion in coping with the human condition. The quest for self-knowledge that this enterprise entails represents the desire to see and to imagine the self from a variety of vantage points.
For Montaigne philosophy is an impossible engagement since he views thought as a destabilizing agent that is open to constant revision. The essayist doubts the possibility of attaining closure in the act of interpretation: “Qui ne diroit que les glosses augmentent les doubtes et l’ignorance, puis qu’il ne se voit aucun livre, soit humain, soit divin, auquel le monde s’embesongne, duquel l’interpretation face tarir la difficulté? … Quand est-il convenu entre nous: ce livres en a assez, il n’y a meshuy plus à dire” (III, 13, 1067) (“Who would not say that glosses increase doubts and ignorance, since there is no book to be found, whether human or divine, with which the world busies itself, whose difficulties are cleared up by interpretation? … When do we agree and say, ‘There has been enough about this book; henceforth there is nothing more to say about it’?” [817]). 1 The consequences of this phenomenon, in the quest for self-knowledge, suggest that Montaigne must theorize the human subject at the limits of the theorizable. The essayist’s self-portrait results from a demand requiring that the quest for signification be maintained and that through this process the grounding of both the thinking subject and knowledge itself be disabled. However, this does not imply that thought becomes arbitrary. On the contrary, intellectual activity becomes a more rigorous way of overcoming the constraints imposed by the exigency to create a purely substantive knowledge. If thought is unable to take hold of itself, it is because the imagination is subject to difference: “Il n’est aucun sens ny visage, ou droit, ou amer, ou doux, ou courbe, que l’esprit humain ne trouve aux escrits qu’il entrepend de fouiller” (II, 12, 585) (“There is no sense or aspect, either straight or bitter, or sweet, or crooked, that the human mind does not find it in the writings it undertakes to search” [442]).
In his commentary on two books by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault writes that philosophy cannot be reduced to mere thought. Instead, he claims that it should be regarded as a form of theater “with multiple scenes that are fleeting and instantaneous.” 2 To be sure, the rhetoric of self-portraiture in Montaigne’s essays suggests that it is the work of a fabulous imagination predicated on the aporetic relationship between seeing and Being. This cognitive faculty links theory and sight to suggest that self-representation stages itself at the cusp of theorization. If the mind is the site of the imagination, then the space in which it takes shape, within the context of the essays, sight and re-cite what it has already seen.
The double entendre of what I call “the mind’s I” represents a conflation of the visual and the self within the rhetoric of self- portraiture: “Moy qui m’espie de plus prez, qui ay les yeux incessamment tendus sur moy” (II, 12, 565) (“I who spy on myself more closely, who have my eyes unceasingly intent on myself …” [425]). If the Greek notion of thea, signifying spectacle and contemplation, evokes the theory that is played out in the mind’s eye, then the Latin imagination, from the same root of imitari, suggests the terms “idea” and “portrait” that are integral to the essaying process. For Montaigne the mind functions as the locus of visualization, with the essay becoming the space in which the self seeks to see itself. This “staging of thought” thus evokes the inescapable reality that theory can only represent itself in the spectacle constituting the play of the text. The mind’s “I” plays itself out on a syntactic stage where the eye refocuses the meaning of things and produces a proliferation of semantic configurations: “Nostre ame regarde la chose d’un autre oeil et se la represente par un autre visage: car chaque chose a plusieurs biais et plusieurs lustres” (I, 38, 235) (“Our soul looks on the thing with a different eye, and represents it to itself in another aspect, for each thing has many angles and many lights” [174]). As Rudolph Gasché suggests, visualizing therefore becomes a process “without end in sight.” If Being is primed by seeing, then the self can only take shape through a rhetoric of the visual. The contemplative “I” that is Montaigne becomes the source of many imagined, literally visualized selves: “I see therefore I am” is a thought process modulated by the visual and in excess of all conceptuality either in epistemological or ontological terms. Here Montaigne anticipates the work of psychoanalysis. In his quest for self-knowledge and his attempt to conceive of it in secular terms, the essayist views the human psyche as an optical phenomenon.
The various identificatory modalities performed through self-portraiture allow Montaigne to identify the self through multiple references that never refer to the same self but nevertheless form a loose association: “Nous sommes tous de lopins, et d’une contexture si informe et diverse, que chaque piece, chaque momant, faict son jeu. Et se trouve autant de difference de nous à nous mesmes, que de nous à autruy” (II, 1, 337) (“We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others” [244]). Yet the epistemological limits of thought’s capacity to take hold of things becomes a warning concerning the self’s ability to find plenitude and closure in the performance of the mind’s “I”: “Joint qu’à l’adventure ay-je quelque obligation particuliere à ne dire qu’à demy, à dire confusément, à dire discordamment” (III, 9, 995–96) (“Besides, perhaps I have some personal obligation to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly, to speak discordantly” [762]). The mind’s “I” can only engage in consistent processes of identification without ever establishing a singular identity or authority. The kinetic energy of the human psyche, as it attempts to envisage subjectivity, fractures the so-called identity of the self, thereby disallowing the essayist’s ability to gaze back on it as a totalizable entity.
If, as I have suggested, Montaigne is theory, it is because theory is enacted in the practice of the essay as it becomes a spectacle on the printed page. The refusal to submit to concepts and essentialize them is totally foreign to the meaning of the word “essay” or its Latin root, exagium, which transcribes the kinetic energy of thought. Even though Edmond Huguet’s Dictionnaire de la langue française does not contain a definition of the word “imagination” per se, it nevertheless contains an entry for the synonymous term “fantasier,” which signifies “imaginer, se livrer à son imagination et être soucieux.” 3 To deliver oneself to one’s imagination is a psychic process that allows thinking to occur; it enables the essayist to explore the heterogeneous nature of things and, in the process, to explore the ontological implications of the void from which the imagination is born. 4 Montaigne’s writing entails a convergence of the “theater” of the Essays with the imaginary architecture in which the self is figured on a world stage: “Si cherchons nous avidement de recognoistre en ombre mesme et en la fable des Theatres la montre des jeux tragiques de l’humaine fortune” (III, 12, 1046) (“Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of the theaters, the representation of the tragic play of human fortune” [800]). What is most striking, however, is the way that the contemporary self imagines its own theatrical character in an inherited form.
The essay, as Montaigne suggests, consequently becomes an exercise in approaching a horizon of possibilities: “Il y a des autheurs, desquels la fin c’est dire les evenements. La mienne, si j’y sçavoye ad-venir, seroit dire sur ce qui peut advenir” (I, 21, 105) (“There are authors whose end is to tell what has happened. Mine, if I could attain it, would be to talk about what can happen” [75]). The force of the imagination is thus predicated on the transgression of limits and the normative notions traditionally associated with epistemological and ontological concerns. For Montaigne the act of submitting concepts to the corrosive practice of the essay undermines the legislating power of absolute forms of knowledge since the multiplicity of its points of reference confounds us. Everything unfolds as the representation of a psychic practice in which different spectacles of thought cannot be reduced or totalized, although in Montaigne’s conception it is essentially a visceral phenomenon that decenters itself in the peripatetic movement of writing: “Mes fantasies se suyvent, mais par fois c’est de loing, et se regardent, mais d’une veue oblique” (III, 9, 994) (“My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a side-long glance” [761]).
What we testify to as the result of experience, as Montaigne discovers in the writings of Cicero and Lucretius, can only be seen as both contingent and relative: “Si nous voyons autant du monde comme nous n’en voyons pas, nous apercevrions, comme il est à croire, une perpetuele multiplication et vicissitude de formes” (III, 6, 908) (“If we saw as much of the world as we do not see, we would perceive, it is likely, a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms” [693]). Yet for Montaigne the vicissitudes of personal experience alone will not suffice since the imagination will also engender unconventional examples that will find a reality somewhere to which they might eventually correspond: “Il ne tombe en l’imagination humaine aucune fantasie si forcenée, qui ne rencontre l’exemple de quelque usage public” (I, 23, 111) (“I think that there falls into man’s imagination no fantasy so wild that it does not match the example of some public practice” [79]). Montaigne here implies that the imagination can produce fantasies that eventually can be encountered in the world.
On another level, however, Montaigne suggests that the force of our imagination requires us to circumscribe the present moment, a process that results in rendering all readings anachronistic by their very nature: “A chaque minute il me semble que je m’eschape” (I, 20, 88) (“Every minute I seem to be slipping away from myself” [61]). The aporia of time is that it is without Being and that it can never simply be present as such. As demonstrated by the narrative performance of self-portraiture, knowledge challenges any form of it that is either self-grounded or self-contained. Theory, conceived as sighting and re-citing, raises epistemological and ontological questions that in practice opens theory to the virtual reality of alterity. “Je sois autre moy-mesmes” (III, 2, 805) (“I am different myself” [611]). The essaying of a particular subject for Montaigne renders it distinct from the positivism associated with the literal objectifications practiced by some. The work of the inquiring mind makes the imagination’s peripatetic movement analogous to that of a journey in which the fruits of a bookish voyage to the past enables the “reader spectator” to revise what he has envisioned as the result of reading: “En cette practique des hommes, j’entends y comprendre, et principalement, ceux qui ne vivent qu’en la memoire des livres. Il practiquera, par le moyen des histoires, ces grandes ames des meilleurs siecles” (I, 26, 156) (“In this association with men I mean to include, and foremost, those who live only in the memory of books. He will associate, by means of histories, with those great souls of the best ages” [115]).
Montaigne’s preambulatory“Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”) poses a curious epistemological problem with far-reaching ontological consequences. He writes as follows of the union between author and text: “Je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre: ce n’est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain” (“I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to suspend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject” [2]). What is striking in this context is that at first the essayist suggests that his self-portrait is transparent and subject to authorial intention. In fact, the essayist suggests that the self-portrait presents a Being “en chair et en os,” which appears to eradicate the artifice of writing. However, at the same time he describes the self as “the matter of the book.” Interestingly, in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, Cotgrave ascribes to the word “matiere” several meanings, among which one finds the terms “substance, a matter, a thing, an argument or discourse of.” 5 Is the matter of the book that he describes an empirical Being, subject to verification, or is it simply a self that is represented discursively in a text? The symbiosis between author and text advocated by those who subscribe to the idea of consubtantiality in its most literal sense fail to consider the fate of a self inscribed in the archive that the Essays have become. For Montaigne the act of reading becomes an act of translation projected beyond the horizion of an indissoluble origin. The question therefore arises whether discursive meaning has a proper term and whether one can recuperate meaning as originally intended: “Il y a plus affaire à interpreter les interpretations qu’à interpreter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre subject: nous ne faisons que nous entregloser” (III, 13, 1069) (“It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other” [818]). As Montaigne writes in “De l’experience”: “Il n’y a point de fin en nos inquisitions; nostre fin est en l’autre monde” (III, 13, 1068) (“There is no end to our researches; our end is in the other world” [817]). Despite the essayist’s claim for the autonomy of the text and the desire for intention and meaning to coincide—“Je entends que la matiere se dsitingue soy-mesmes” (III, 9, 995) (“I want the matter to make its own divisions” [761])—the book nevertheless cannot keep authorial intention intact since our imaginative inquiries as readers render texts subject to change. This dilemma represents the aporia of self-portraiture, in which the book continues to live on and have a life of its own. To be sure, the text and the person are discrete and separate entities. The act of reading is an act of translation since it makes a text other than it might have been. Montaigne’s writing suggests that the dead do indeed have a future beyond the ontological parameters of their existences. This annotation of Being as it unfolds in the future anterior, through a series of differential re-markings, demystifies the very notion of identity.
When Montaigne speaks about what can be, he is in a sense already speaking about thealterity endemic to what represents the valences of the future. As suggested in “De l’affection des peres aux enfans” (“Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children”) the essayist describes the book as a child of the mind exhibiting virtual potential: “Il peut sçavoir assez de choses que je ne sçay plus, et tenir de moy ce que je n’ay point retenu et qu’il faudroit que, tout ainsi qu’un es-tranger, j’empruntasse de luy, si besoin m’en venoit” (II, 8, 402) (“It may know a good many things that I no longer know and hold from me what I have not retained and what, just like a stranger, I should have to borrow from it if I came to need it” [293]). Here Montaigne paradoxically depends on the reader to reveal the traces of what may be described as a “textual unconscious.” By engaging in a hermeneutic interaction with the text, which Montaigne characterizes in “De la resemblance des enfans aux peres” (Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers”) as “cette peinture morte et muete” (II, 37, 784) (“this dead and mute portrait” [596]), he allows himself the freedom to reinvent himself through the sighting and re-citing of the text: “Je donne à mon ame tantost un visage, tantost un autre, selon le costé où je la couche. Si je parle diversement de moy, c’est que je me regarde diversement. Toutes les contrarietez s’y trouvent, selon quelque tour, et en quelque façon (II, 1, 335) (“I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion” [242]).
The narrative self depicted by the writer can never be construed as a self-identical Being. Instead, the revisionary practice associated with the act of “essaying” engenders a narrative that, like the work of the imagination, is always already incomplete. The signature “Montaigne” is associated with the writer who has generated the text and the constructed figure born from the writing of the essay; the latter becomes the character whose representation disfigures the narrator’s so-called intentionality. As Richard Regosin has claimed, “the ‘Au Lecteur’ inscribes and … includes a reader [who] ostensibly seeks to dissuade [others] from reading, a reader who has no memory of Montaigne, no referential ground upon which to fix the signs of writing and confirm their meaning.” 6 The theatricality of theory, as it is performed in the essay, precludes the possible conjunction of seeing and Being; it acquires a perverse kind of relation that undermines the possibility of transcendence. Montaigne’s theater of the imagination thus depicts a desiring subject who is always already in pursuit of something beyond itself because the quest for self-knowledge reveals insufficiency or lack in that which it supplements. With this in mind, the Essays unfolds as a virtual narrative in which different narrative spectacles cannot be reduced to a single vantage point.
The intellectual climate in which Montaigne composed the essays had an affinity for classical thought, particularly that of the Stoics. 7 For Plato vision in the sense of theoria evokes an idea of vision that is integrally linked to the contemplation of knowledge and is characterized as the most exemplary mode of cognition. In the “Apologie” Montaigne proclaims: “Les yeux humains ne peuvent apercevoir les choses que par les formes de leur cognoissance” (II, 12, 535) (“Human eyes can perceive things only in the forms that they know” [399]). In the Republic, for example, Plato makes reference to sight, which, unlike the other senses, needs light from the outside in order to function.
Epistemologically speaking Platonic thought draws a parallel between the eye ( onima ) and the sun ( helios ). The word “vision” as we know it today does not signify the Greek notion opsis, which suggests the idea of spectacle. Contemplation as spectacle in the Platonic sense maintains a relationship to Being that is curiously present unto itself; it shifts the visuality of theory from theoria to the theos that is divinity itself.
The idea of the imagination in Hellenic thought was renewed by Aristotle, with attention focused on the material world. 8 While remaining faithful to the epistemological function of imaging, Aristotle shifted the emphasis in his analysis from metaphysical to psychological concerns. He adhered to the belief that images in the mind result from sense perception as depicted by the imagination ( phantasma ). For Aristotle the image functioned as the mediator between sensation and reason, thereby allowing one to determine the veracity or falsehood of imaginative activities.
To consider the imagination within an Aristotelian framework requires that attention be paid to the notion of mimesis or representation. If the Platonic approach to the imagination is based on the external imitation of a divine ideality, then the Aristotelian imperative suggests that the image be treated as a mental representation ( phantasma ) that views the world and reflects it within.
Interestingly, Aristotle links the imagination to human desire, whose ultimate goal is knowledge. But what Aristotle considers knowledge he describes as a lack that can only be realized through the kinetic energy of desire. For instance, in De Anima Aristotle examines the psychological character of images and how the material nature of desire is transcribed within the specularity of the mind. For Aristotle the eye sees itself as it sees its reflection. Montaigne, however, recognizes the importance of sight and what is seen. However, he does so by shifting the emphasis from that which is seen to the gaze of the viewer: “Je dy librement mon advis de toutes choses … ce que j’en opine, c’est aussi pour declarer la mesure de ma veue, non la mesure des choses.” (II, 10, 410) (“I speak my mind freely on all things… . And so the opinion I give of them is to declare the measure of my sight, not the measure of things” [298]).
Although Montaigne draws on Aristotle’s concept of psychic mobility, his writing practice fails to account for the veracity of any one thing: “Tous jugemens en gros sont laches et imparfaicts.” (III, 8, 943) (“All judgmens in gross are loose and imperfect” [721]). In the essays the spiritual and corporeal aspects of the human subject are seen in a state of mobility, which contradicts any claim to sameness: “[ Je] reçoy plus facilement la difference que la ressemblance.” (I, 37, 229) (“I more easily admit difference than ressemblance” [169]) The autokinetic nature of the imagination renders it in conflict with reason, which by its very nature parallels Pierre de La Primaudaye’s belief that “il s’emeut un combant entre l’esprit et l’imagination.” 9 With this in mind, the imagination is conceived as a transgressive force that undermines the consistency of the self. The encounter with the self as other reveals a divided condition, which also relates to the endless curiosity and vanity that characterizes the human subject and that Montaigne often reiterates: “[De telles] inquisitions et contemplations philosophiques ne servent que d’aliment à nostre curiosité” (III, 13, 1073) (“[Such] philosophical inquiries and meditations serve only as food for our curiosity” [ 821]). In his writing Montaigne emphasizes the fluidity of the human imagination in perceiving the external world through the perception of sight and sound, as well as its ability to constitute fictions in the theater of the mind. To be sure, the essay becomes a locus of confrontation of the self with its condition of alterity. In the process, it posits a specular relation that raises the issue of the totalization of self-portraiture: “Moy à cette heure et moy tantost sommes bien deux” (III, 9, 964) (“Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two.” [736]).
Recently John Lyons has demonstrated the role of the imagination among the Stoics and its influence on the writing of the Essays. 10 According to Lyons, for Seneca the work of the imagination is integrally related to the question of freedom and the ability to confront death with a sense of inner tranquillity. Sometimes, when anticipating death, the imagination makes it appear greater than it is: “Plusieurs choses nous semblent plus grandes par imagination que par effect” (II, 6, 372) (“Many things seem to us greater in imagination than in reality” [268]). However, what is required in order to come to terms with mortality is a sense of discipline and order in one’s daily life. Lyons’s analysis suggests that Montaigne’s thought owes much to the Stoic practice of “embedded imagining.” The imagination’s ability to engage with the mysteries of the unknown and to perceive visual images as if they were real in order to anticipate and neutralize what might result from thinking about death allows the essayist to manage his fear of mortality and to accept what his imagination has envisaged as an integral part of human experience.
What is particular to Montaigne’s adaptation of the Stoic imagination, however, is not an unmitigated adherence to its ethics. The stoical technique of self-mastery and reason may protect the essayist from the effects of contingency but it does not necessarily produce self-knowledge.
Ostons luy l’estrangeté, pratiquons le, accoustumons le. N’ayons rien si souvent en la teste que la mort. A tous instants representons la à nostre imagination et en tous visages. Au broncher d’un cheval, à la cheute d’une tuille, à la moindre piqueure d’espleingue, remachons soudain: Eh bien, quand ce seroit la mort mesme? (I, 20, 86)
Let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin prick, let us promptly chew on this: Well, what if it were death itself? (60)
Although he opts for a more temperate mastery of the self before the specter of death, he reduces its threat by imagining it as a phenomenon integral to the very movement of life itself: “Aussi ay-je puis en coustume d’avoir non seulement en l’imagination, mais continuellement la mort en la bouche” (I, 20, 90) (“So I have formed the habit of having death continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth” [62]). The confrontation with death thus requires imagining it otherwise as an atomistic phenomenon reflecting the human subject’s elusive relation to itself. Stoicism imparts to the essayist a modus operandi. Yet it is through the flexibility of the imagination and the consciousness of the movement constituting the rhythm of life that the essayist is able to modulate the constancy of the Stoic position. It is therefore not surprising that in “De la force de l’imagination” (I, 21) (“On the Power of the Imagination”)—the essay that immediately follows “Que philosopher c’est apprendre à mourir” (I, 20) (“That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die”)—there is the suggestion that the imaginaton cannot remain steady and is, in fact, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of human experience.
Montaigne’s desire to create a psychic space, where he could exercise his imagination freely in the solitude of his “arrière boutique,” enabled him to modify the self through a series of images:
Il se faut reserver une arriere-boutique toute nostre, toute franche, en laquelle nous establissons nostre vraye liberté et principale retraicte et solitude. En cette-cy faut-il prendre nostre ordinaire entretien de nous à nous mesmes, et si privé que nulle acointance ou communication estrangiere y trouve place. (I, 39, 241)
We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place. (177)
The theater of the mind becomes the stage upon which the mind’s “I” performs the representation of its inner being. Yet the persona constructed in the essaying process presents the image of someone more in tune with “les ames communes” than the “autheurs” from which he wishes to distinguish himself in “Du repentir” (“Of Repentance”).
The Stoic imagination stressed the superiority of the mind over the body, and in Montaigne we see how the imagination can remove one from the corporeal displeasures of the present. To be sure, Montaigne asserts intellectual authority by engaging in the ultimate object of philosophy, namely, to learn how to die or, better yet, how to live well by accepting the fact that death is not the goal of life but simply its end. There is indeed something noble in envisaging death, which “le vulgaire” or “common herd” is incapable of doing.
In “essaying” the topos of death, Montaigne uses the imagination in order to free himself from a painful reality conceived of as an external danger to the self. The anticipatory anxiety associated with death results from the imagination’s ability to make death appear to be more epic that it is: “Nous estimons grande chose nostre mort” (II, 13, 606) (“We consider our death a great thing” [458]). Montaigne identifies himself in the mind’s “I” with the physical instability of the universe. He enables himself to overcome the fear of death by demystifying its teleological function and reconceiving it as a series of discrete ephemeral passages. The visceral images associated with the “danse macabre” are displaced by the imagination’s deliberate attempt to disengage itself from a terrifying cathexis and to reinscribe death within the more felicitous rhythm of daily life: “Le continuel ouvrage de vostre vie c’est bastir la mort. Vous estes en la mort pendant que vous estes en vie. Car vous estes apres la mort quand vous n’estes plus en vie” (I, 20, 93) (“The constant work of your life is to build death. You are in death while you are in life; for you are after death when you are no longer in life” [65]).
What Montaigne inherits from the Stoic tradition can be described as a practice of self-care that depends on an ideality requiring actions to conform to reason. As in the case of Aristotle, Montaigne delineates a relationship between the imagination and perception while drawing on the Stoic practice that enables the imagination to negotiate between body and mind. Yet the ethical imperative associated with the Stoic tradition to create a stable and detached self undergoes a significant transformation in the Essays by allowing the self to engage in commerce with otherness: 11 “Les livres m’ont servi non tant d’instruction que d’exercitation” (III, 12, 1039) (“Books have served me not so much for instruction as for exercise” [795]). Insofar as theory is a discourse that opens subjects to the nonidentical, cognitive mastery becomes an impossibility that nevertheless calls for a new kind of responsibility. The impossible creates and keeps open the possibility of the coming of the other, which is beyond the authority of authorship.
If Montaigne adopts from the Stoics the superiority of the mind over the body, he does so by transcending the constraints of reason. Montaigne’s writing, as he describes it in “De la vanité” (III, 9) (“Of Vanity”), takes shape according to the peripatetic rhythm of the wandering mind: “Mon stile et mon esprit vont vagabondant des mesmes.” (III, 9) (“My style and my mind alike go roaming” [761]) The implication suggested here is that writing seduces or, etymologically speaking, leads astray (se = ducere ) through the digressions (de-grad, to walk aside), leading to the perversion (to go off track) of an idea.
The exemplarity of the imagination in relation to the body is perhaps most keenly observed in “Sur des vers de Virgile” (III, 5) (“On Some Verses of Virgil”). Here Montaigne demonstrates a preference for Virgil’s elliptical evocation of love over Martial’s crude representation of it since, metaphorically speaking, it threatens to emasculate him: “Il me semble qu’il me chapone… . Celuy qui dict tout, il nous saoule et nous desgouste” (III, 5, 880) (“He who says everything satiates and disgusts us” [671]). If, as Montaigne claims, Virgil’s representation of love is more like love than love, it is because the mimetic qualities of his writing succeeds more by “periphrase et peinture” (III, 5, 848) (“roundaboutly and figuratively” [644]) than by “dévolement.”(unveiling). The power of the imagination allows Venus, the goddess of love, to project the face of that which is most invisible. To be sure, if, according to the logocentric myth, language can capture referentiality in its process of unveiling, ironically it can only do so through suggestion and by obscuring its empirical point of reference. In the end, less paradoxically becomes more.
As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Montaigne’s “Sur des vers de Virgile” is a response to the onset of old age and sexual decline, revealing the latent desires of a subject in search of regeneration through the pleasures of the text: 12 “Puisque c’est le privilege de l’esprit de se r’avoir de la vieillesse, je luy conseille, autant que je puis, de le faire; qu’il verdisse, qu’il fleurisse ce pendant, s’il peut, comme le guy sur un arbre mort” (III, 5, 844) (“Since it is the privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age, I advise mine to do so as strongly as I can. Let it grow green, let it flourish meanwhile, if it can, like mistletoe on a dead tree” [641]). If the desire for sexual pleasure declines in old age, it is textual exploration that enables the essayist to sustain the pleasure of youth through the materiality of language.
The greatest incitement to Venus’s games is to hide them from view; the greatest way to curtail desire is to expose it in all its nudity. From this perspective, desire operates according to the exigencies of metonomy. Art therefore becomes the mediator of erotic stimulation . If Nature, represented as the “mauvais mere,” is responsible for the decline of Montaigne’s virility, it is in contrast to art, which enables sexual pleasure. If taken seriously, this understanding demands a poetics not of unveiling but of obscurity and diversion: “Est-ce à dire que moins nous en exhalons en parole, d’autant nous avons loy d’en gros-sir la pensée?” (III, 5, 847) (“Does this mean that the less we breathe of it in words, the more we have the right to swell our thoughts with it?” [644]). The success of Virgil’s and Lucretius’s fertile allusiveness stems from the power of the imagination to penetrate the secrets nature holds in abeyance: “Celuy qui craint à s’exprimer nous achemine à en penser plus qu’il n’en y a” (III, 5, 880) (“He who is afraid to express himself leads us on to think more than there is” [671]).
In “De l’institution des enfans” (“Of the Education of Children”), for example, the Montaignian imagination envisages an allegorical figure of Philosophy, mannishly dressed like Ariosto’s Bradamente, who wears a helmet and is much like Pallas Athena herself. Represented as a composite ideal, the figure of Philosophy accompanies men throughout their lives, even in the decrepitude of old age: “La philosophie a des discours pour la naissance des hommes comme pour la decrepitude… . C’est ce que dict Epicurus au commencement de sa lettre à Meniceus: ‘Ny le plus jeune refuie à philosopher, ny le plus vieil s’y lasse’” (I, 26, 164) (“Philosophy has lessons for the birth of men as well as for their decrepitude… . It is what Epicurus says at the beginning of his letter to Meniceus: ‘Neither let the youngest refuse to study philosophy, nor the oldest weary of it” [121]). This improper figure in drag, so to speak, becomes a valued partner despite her boyish dress. If Philosophy becomes a more proper partner in its impropriety, it is because it offers more than those feminine ladies, who disdain old men (“le desdain de ces beaux yeux” (III, 5, 887) (“the disdain of those four eyes” [677]). Without the presence of this voluptuous albeit manly cross-dresser in the theater of the imagination, life would become monstrous; without the presence of Philosophy we would be no better off than beasts: “Mais son office propre et particulier … sans lequel tout cours de vie est desnaturé, turbulent, et difforme, et y peut on justement attacher ces escueils, ces hail-ers, et ces monsters” (I, 26, 162) (“But her own particular task … without which the course of any life is denatured, turbulent, and deformed, and fit to be associated with those dangers, those brambles, and those monsters” [120]). Philosophy therefore takes on erotic connotations since it “chatouille ou poigne vostre conscience” (III, 9, 989) (“tickles or pricks your conscience” [757]).
If the imagination can enact a form of theatricality through the power of the will, it can also be acted upon by physical symptoms. In “De l’exercitation” (“Of Practice”) the text represents a fantasy in which the physical senses, through the re-membering of an accident, produce psychological speculations resulting from the power of the involuntary will: “Il y a plusieurs mouvemens en nous qui ne partent pas de nostre ordonnance” (II, 6, 375) (“There are movements of ours that do not come from our will” [271]). For Montaigne, however, the power of the imagination can also produce infelicitous consequences that make the thinking subject go astray. Our ability to take hold of the world can only be mimetic and not “vraisemblable” in the Aristotelian sense of the term.
The narrative self depicted in the Essays, endlessly reconfigured by the imagination, produces a monstrous form that is forever in a state of crisis because of its inability to assume the shape of a single image. In writing the Essays Montaigne comes to perceive the monster within himself as an amorphous spectacle to be seen. The representation of the mind’s eye envisages a self depicted as a monster in the etymological sense of the word ( monstrum ). Montaigne insists upon displaying his inadequacies, demonstrating them to the public, and making a spectacle out of his own deformity. The narrator’s mise en scène projects a spectacle to see and an imperative to be seen ( monstrare, to show): “Je n’ay veu monstre et miracle au monde plus expres que moy-mesme… . Mais plus je me hante et me connois, plus ma difformité m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.” (III, 11, 1029) (“I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself… . But the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself ” [787]). In “De l’institution des enfans” Montaigne depicts the child of his mind, with its distinctive failings and deformities: “Quant aux facultez naturelles qui sont en moy, dequoy c’est icy l’essay, je les sens flechir sous la charge. Mes conceptions et mon jugement ne marche qu’à tastons, chancelant, bronchant et chopant” (I, 26, 146) (“As for the natural faculties that are in me, of which this book is the essay, I feel them bending under the load. My conceptions and my judgment move only by groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering” [107]). If the cogitations of Montaigne’s imagination enact an immaculate conception resulting from the imprint of a self-image represented as other, it is in order to show that the creation of an imperfect father, one who was lazy and unable to stick to a single subject, produces a son whose imperfections are quite analogous.
Throughout the essays Montaigne draws on a series of anecdotes, both textual and empirical, using their imaginative potential— sometimes to the point of deformation—to recast its meaning. A key topos that emerges in relation to the imagination is that of monstrosity. In “De l’oisiveté” (“Of Idleness”) the project of writing is conceived of as an act of registering the monstrous productions of the mind: “Pour en contempler à mon aise l’ineptie et l’estrangeté, j’ay commencé de les mettre en rolle, esperant avec le temps luy en faire honte à luy mesmes” (I, 8, 70) (“In order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself” [21]).
The monster, represented by incomprehensible difference, comes to represent the otherness associated with the self; the fantasies of the human mind reveal imaginative peregrinations suggesting that monsters can also be creations of the mind. However, the essayist’s desire to contemplate the otherness within the self (an otherness signified by “l’ineptie et l’estrangete”) cannot be fully circumvented by the injunction that the mind should be ashamed of itself when confronted with its monsters. If the imagination presupposes the existence of a “reality” that is different from it, it is because the imaginary, while transgressing the limits of what we call reality, creates a space in which the distinguishing features between the real and the imagined are indiscernible.
The condition of alterity that characterizes the mind in its mobility dislocates the specular relation with the particular instance of the mind as it is represented in the text: “Je prononce ma sentence par articles descousus, ainsi que de choses 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]). The aporia created by passing from the cognitive fabrication of the grotesque to its transcription in the text allows for a change confirming its protean form. The textual representation of experience has the potential to offer, if not oracular veracity, then at least a future other to which it is connected through a shared experience of alterity. Moreover, the description of the essays provided at the beginning of “De l’amitié” (“Of Friendship”) suggests the characteristics of an “écriture informe,” a writing of the marginal and difference: “Que sont-ce icy aussi … que crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n’ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite” (I, 28, 183) (“And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental?” [135]).
Among the many metaphors Montaigne uses to describe his Essays, he seems particularly fond of thinking of them as “les en-fantemens de nostre esprit.” (“the children of our mind”). In “Du dementir,” (“Of Giving the Lie”), for example, he sustains the idea that writing down his wild fancies gives them direction and purpose: “Aux fins de renger ma fantasie à resver mesme par quelque ordre et projet, et la garder de se perdre et extravaguer au vent, il n’est que de donner corps et mettre en registre tant de menues pensées qui se presentent à elle” (II, 18, 665) (“In order to train my fancy even to dream with some order and purpose, and in order to keep it from losing its way and roving with the wind, there is nothing like embodying and registering all the little thoughts that come to it.” [504]).
For Montaigne the work of the imagination is also a work of mourning. The question that therefore arises is how we as readers can act ethically, out of a sense of duty, toward Montaigne yet still enable him to speak in his very absence. To be sure, Jacques Derrida tells us that mourning is a discursive performance of sorts that constitutes the acting out of inheritance and, in the process, allows it to become the locus of desire. 13 The reader of Montaigne becomes the guardian of the text’s memory and therefore enables us, as John O’Brien suggests, to see the dead: 14 “Tout ainsi que nature nous faict voir, que plusieurs choses mortes ont encore des relations occultes à la vie” (I, 3, 21) (“Even so nature shows us that many dead things still have occult relations to life” [13]). In a text on Roland Barthes Derrida once suggested that it is only “in us that the dead may speak and ultimately reside, thereby revealing that death is not the end of being.” 15 If death delivers us to memory and interiorization, it is in order to engage in the performance of a ghostly inheritance and debt. Yet the complex play of virtualization that characterizes the act of reading engenders complex relations of spatiotemporal dislocation that challenge the stability of self-contained realms.
The representation of the text as monument suggests the commemoration of the past (monument as tomb) and the possibility of predicting the future (monument, like monstrum, is derived from monere, to predict. Conscious of the text’s ability to generate future texts from the inheritance of the past, Montaigne invites readers to engage in the same proliferation of writing he produced in the all0n-geails through the rereading of his essays. Montaigne thus sees reading as a form of seeing. This model appears to be contiguous with the idea of experience, the subject of the penultimate essay. Even though he expresses reticence concerning the reader’s penchant to deform the matter of the text, he nevertheless realizes that in the end the work of the imagination always sabotages the authority of authorship. In the “Apologie” he expressed the fear that his work, like that of Tasso, would become deformed and left in a state that would be beyond his capacity to remedy: “J’eus plus de despit encore que de compassion, de le voir à Ferrare en si piteux estat, survivant à soy-mesmes, mesconnoissant et soy et ses ouvrages, lesquels, sans son sçeu, et toutesfois à sa veue, on a mis en lumiere incorrigez et informes” (II, 12, 492) (I felt even more vexation than compassion to see him in Ferrara in so piteous a state, surviving himself, not recognizing himself or his works, which, without his knowledge and yet before his eyes, have been brought out uncorrected and shapeless” [363]).
Referring to the way in which he narrates stories, the essayist declares that “chacun y peut joindre ses exemples” (105) (“everyone can add his own examples to them” [75]). In order to traverse the aporia, the textual locus at the limit of past and future, the finite work must contain in its own negation a rewriting that paradoxically constitutes an undoing.
Just as Montaigne inherited the traces of the dead in the form of La Boétie’s library, so we, as readers of the Essays, are haunted by texts yet enable them to live on as a ghostly inheritance: “Ce qui me sert, peut aussi par accident servir à un autre” (II, 6, 377) (“What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another” [272]). The survival of Montaigne therefore becomes a question of transcending the original desire, set down in “Au lecteur,” to limit the readership of his essays to a small circle of friends and relatives. His survival is also related to the promise of the archive, which exteriorizes what has been deposited there; it re-members a corpus through disfiguration so that rigor mortis might not finally set in. The so-called death of the author paradoxically gives new life beyond the finitude of the text, for it gives a future to a life that will have been through a narrative whose remains might be read otherwise. Like the Freudian concept of repression, our talking through the Essays, produced in the paradoxical act of reading, could, in fact, begin to interpret what the essayist might not have known: “En mes escris mesmes je ne re-trouve pas tousjours l’air de ma premiere imagination: je ne sçay ce que j’ay voulu dire” (II, 12, 566) (“Even in my own writings I do not always find again the sense of my first thought ; I do not know what I meant to say” [425–26]). The desire to restore the so-called interlocutory scene, a practice that some critics still hold dear, renders the text “Montaigne” hostage to a recuperative impulse, suggesting that we cannot survive with an unconscious. Montaigne may proclaim in “Au Lecteur” that “c’est moy que je peins” (“it is myself that I portray” [2]), but by the end of the book “ce n’est plus moy” (III, 13,1102) (“it is no longer myself” [846]). If the essays constitute the practice of self-portraiture, they nevertheless represent a failure to enact the ideality of the writerly quest. Victim of a hermeneutic disclosure, Montaigne’s text claims that the publication of his book “mortgages” it to the world and thereby fails to maintain the authority of authorship: “Celuy qui a hypothecqué au monde son ouvrage, je trouve apparence qu’il n’y aye plus de droict” (III, 9, 963) (“When a man has mortgaged his work to the world, it seems to me that he has no further right to it” [736]). However, knowing how futile it may be to recover intentionality, the essayist responds by wishing to return as a ghostly presence in order to rectify the misreading to which he writing has fallen victim: “Je reviendrois volontiers de l’autre monde pour démentir celuy qui me formeroit autre que je n’estois, fut ce pour m’honorer” (III, 9, 983) (“I would willingly come back from the other world to give the lie to any man who portrayed me other than I was, even if it were to honor me” [751]).
The disparity between the event of thought and its interpretation precludes our ability to recover things as they once were: “[Il] n’y a rien qui demeure, ne qui soit toujours un … l’aage et generation sub-sequente va tousjours desfaisant et gastant la precedente” (II, 12, 602) (“There is nothing that abides and is always the same … the subsequent age and generation is always undoing and destroying the preceding one” [456]). If we read because we wish to hear, isn’t the goal of reading ideally meant to function as a recuperative act? Interestingly, despite the essayist’s belief that La Boétie is more present to him in his absence than in his presence, he suggests that the imaginary dialogue he maintains with his friend merely functions at a loss, imbricated as it is in the movement of difference. Montaigne posits a possible termination of inquiry when he asks: “Le principal et plus fameux sçavoir de nos siecles, est-ce pas sçavoir entendre les sçavans?” (III, 13, 1069) (“Is it not the chief and most reputed learning of our times to learn to understand the learned?” [818]). If understanding is conceived of as a way of attempting to hear, then the possibility of coming into direct contact with the ancients is indeed slight.
The paradigm of interpretation that Montaigne performs in “De l’experience” suggests that the production of meaning occurs over time, resulting in an endless series of hermeneutic complications. The temporalizing effect of reading means that signification can never be self-identical: “Trouvons nous pourtant quelque fin au besoin d’interpreter? S’y voit-il quelque progres et advancement vers la tranquilité? Nous faut-il moins d’advocats et de juges que lors que cette masse de droict estoit encore en sa premiere enfance?” (III, 13, 1068) (“Do we therefore find any end to the need of interpreting? Do we see any progress and advance toward tranquillity? Do we need fewer lawyers and judges than when this mass of law was still in its infancy?” [817]). If, as the essayist suggests, interpretation and knowability are ephemeral, it is because meaning cannot reconstitute itself exactly as it was contextually. Perhaps interpretation best succeeds when it fails; the work of such an author “n’est vif qu’à demy” (III, 13, 1068) (“is only half alive” [818]).
For Montaigne theory thus opens itself up to the unconditionality of the writing of the essays and, in the process, engages in different ways of eroding what constitutes “reality.” The Essays represents the consequences of such a vision by refusing to deny the otherness of Being: “Mais nous sommes, je ne sçay comment, doubles en nous-mesmes, qui faict que ce que nous croyons, nous ne le croyons pas, et ne nous pouvons deffaire de ce que nous condamnons” (II, 16, 619) (“But we are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn” [469]). Theorizing is an act of resistance to the redaction of thought; the performance of self-reflexive play cannot contain itself, for the inquiring mind invents yet other theoretical re-visions that undercut the self-grounding necessary for the construction of “identity:” “Moy à cette heure et moy tantost som-mes bien deux” (III, 9, 964) (“Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two” [736]). The paradoxical task of Montaigne’s writing is to dismantle the fiction of what is real and instead engage in a form of speculation that projects what may be considered to be “real” into what is other than itself. Montaigne’s text aims to transcend the closed circle of representation by permitting the fabulous imagination the possibility of living on: “Autant en fera le second au tiers” (II, 12, 561) (“The second will do as much for the third” [421]). The projection of Being for Montaigne thus produces an archive that can never be fully possessed. Imaginative play nevertheless allows for spatio-temporal renewal by making Montaigne’s thought possible as something still to come: “C’est tesmoignage de crudité et indigestion que de regorger la viande comme on l’a avallée. L’estomac n’a pas faict son operation, s’il n’a faict changer la façon et la forme à ce qu’on luy avoit donné à cuire.” (I, 26, 151) (“It is a sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it. The stomach has not done its work if it has not changed the condition and form of what has been given it to cook” [111])
More than three centuries before the birth of psychoanalysis, Montaigne’s Essays lay bare the workings of the human imagination while performing a pivotal role in the development of the idea of human subjectivity. Harold Bloom suggests that Freud had more in common with Montaigne than with the biological sciences: “Montaigne’s defense of the self is also an analysis of the self, and Montaigne appears now to have been the ancestor not only of Emerson and Nietzsche, both of whom acknowledge him, but also of Freud, who did not.” 16
The present study examines how Montaigne, the inventor of the modern essay, signals the emergence of the Western concept of the self by exploring how human desires and fears are represented in writing. In the Essays the imagination acts as the generative core of an internal universe that influences both the body and mind and reveals itself as essential to human experience. At times Montaigne’s text actually performs a healing function resulting from the playful work of the imagination. The imagination allows the essayist to approach the unknowable and the unswayable. It can cause pain but it can also have a curative effect. Far from being an object of scorn (many sixteenth-century European thinkers disparaged the imagination because of its relationship to the senses and the realm of the body), the imagination is often portrayed positively in Montaigne’s work. Although the essayist recognizes that the power of the imagination can blind and confuse us, revealing our inability to grasp things, he often represents it as curative, enabling the mind’s “I” to sustain itself in the face of human difficulty.
Montaigne’s writing depicts imaginative experiences that test the limits of identity, knowledge, and ethics, such as the beyond of death, the ineffable nature of human desire, and the monstrousness of the self. The work of the imagination realizes possibilities that are discovered in a nature that is not as socially restrictive as one that is socially constructed. The cultural encounters that constitute what is socially proper involve moments of impropriety; it is in these moments that the question of difference is explored and thereby affords the imagination the possibility of exploring a world without limits. Through the rhetorical configurations that constitute the search for self- knowledge, the mind’s “I” in Montaigne creates a persona that overcomes the contingencies of existence and allows the imagination to invent other selves. The power of the imagination engenders critical fictions in which language points to an ethereal reality created by the mind’s “I”: “Combien de fois ce n’est plus moy!” (III, 13,1102) (“How irrevocably it is no longer myself” [846]).
The individual chapters of the present study serve as case studies that demonstrate how the essays are expositions of ambivalence and the unresolved tension of living in the world. My goal, therefore, is not to present a unified, static Hegelian account of the Essays. Such a master narrative would go against the spirit of the essays.
Et ne desseigne jamais de les produire entiers. Car je ne voy le tout de rien… . De cent membres et visages qu’a chaque chose, j’en prens un tantost à lecher seulement, tantost à effleurer; et par fois à pincer jusqu’à l’os… . Semant icy un mot, icy un autre, eschantillons despris de leur piece, sans dessein escortez et sans promesse, je ne suis pas tenu d’en faire bon … me rend[ant] au doubte et incertitude, et à ma maistresse forme, qui est l’ignorance. (I, 50, 302)
And I never plan to develop them completely… . Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone… . Scattering a word here, there another, samples separated from their context, dispersed, without a plan and without a promise, I am not bound to make something of them … giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance. (219)
In accordance with Montaigne’s desire for his text to remain forever fertile and in balance, the present study delineates the rhetorical choreographics associated with the kinetic energy of the essay, for to do otherwise would be to disable what Montaigne calls “the power of the imagination.” Each chapter demonstrates how the imagination functions as an effect of language. To be sure, the “power of the imagination” generates the construction of meaning and enables it to play itself out rhetorically in the performance of the essay. Since Montaigne wished his essays to have a future, he requested that we read them as engaged readers by permitting ourselves to be modern, as he himself was in his own time.
Part I, “Monster Theory,” examines the fragility of gender resulting from the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. Utilizing the trope of the monstrous body, it records an alternative to the rigidity associated with what is conceived of as natural and suggests that gender is not solely bound up with sexuality. For Montaigne the human condition is para-doxical, with the marginal coming to char-acterize the natural. In demonstrating the permeability of the human imagination, Montaigne’s text emphasizes the performative construction of gender, suggesting that the active role of gender can call into question the very idea of the “natural” to which difference is meant to be reduced. Chapter 1, containing an analysis of “De la force de l’imagination”(I, 21) (“Of the Power of the Imagination”) focuses on the relationship between psychic activity and sexuality, as well as on how the concept of nature is more a question of mind over matter. Montaigne represents the imagination’s speculative power in enacting “sex-change operations”; sexual metamorphoses are realized when conventionally developed gender roles are transgressed. By describing varieties of monstrosity, Montaigne’s essay “Des boiteux” (III, 11) (Of Cripples”), the subject of chapter 2, first proposes a hermeneutic riddle, disguised as an epistemological question, and finally takes on ontological proportions by revealing the crippled judgment that is endemic to the human condition. Montaigne’s essay challenges the illusory nature of masculinity and the authority upon which its rests. The recognition of lameness and monstrosity ironically possesses a potency of its own.
Part II, “Death Sentences” studies the gnawing presence of death in the areas of friendship, writing, and the public world of counsel. It examines how the imagination relates to the act of mourning and how it overcomes the fear of death through diversionary tactics and simulation. Chapter 3, “Montaigne’s Fraternity: La Boétie on Trial,” examines the ways in which “De l’amitié” functions as a prosthesis of La Boétie’s De la servitude volontaire. It discusses how that friendship survives and perhaps even dies a second death in the essayist’s speculative peregrinations. Chapter 4, “Montaigne on Horseback, or the Simulation of Death,” recounts how the practice of death—an existential impossibility—is mediated through the experience of writing and gives meaning to his fall. (Here “on horse back” functions as a play on words; its French equivalent “à cheval” can also be understood as “in-between,” as, for example, the impossible passage between life and death or between being and nothingness.) Chapter 5, “The Anxiety of Death: Narrative and Subjectivity in ‘De la diversion’,” examines how the preoccupation with death functions as the condition of narrative in its diversionary strategy. An analysis of this essay reveals how the imagination enacts the scene that the essay depicts, the vain movement of diversion, by mirroring the theoretical strategy that is the subject of the writing. Chapter 6, “Excavating Montaigne: The Essayist on Trial,” discusses the relationship between the essayist and Marie de Gournay, the essayist’s adopted daughter and literary executor. This chapter demonstrates how de Gournay imagines Montaigne’s desire beyond death, suggesting that death has a procreative function since the imagination has a future as inheritance. By assuming the role of literary executor, de Gournay tries to do for Montaigne what he had done for La Boétie in preserving— and perhaps disfiguring—his literary fortune.
Part III, “Philosophical Impostures,” examines questions of philosophy, experience, and the relation of self-portraiture to oblivion. It deals with questions of ethics and its relationship to self- portraiture. Chapter 7, “The Socratic Makeover,” explores how, through the power of the imagination, the essayist disfigures his borrowed texts and produces a proliferation of “phisionomies” that enable the essay to become the site (as well as the sight) of a literary portrait. By challenging the notion of authenticity, “De la phisionomie” (III,12) (“Of Physiognomy”) depicts an ethically responsible imagination in its resistance to master narratives.
Chapter 8, “Romancing the Stone,” studies the themes of diversity and difference in relation to the rhetoric of self-portraiture in “De l’experience” (III, 13) (“Of Experience”) in the process suggesting that the imagination is capable of expanding the boundaries in which the cultural expectations of what constitutes masculinity can be re-vised. By going beyond the propriety of what is considered natural, the essay engages in moments of impropriety in which questions of difference are explored and through which the essayist is offered a choice in the construction of the self. This chapter also explores the literary representation of the famous biographical anecdote concerning Montaigne’s kidney stone. The metaphor of the kidney stone and the pain of its passage become the subject of a “family romance” in which the imagination permits the essayist to reflect on his mortality. The drama of this passage in the mind’s “I” describes the body as an agent that enables the essayist to distance himself from his lineage and go beyond the parameters of what are socially accepted notions of gender.
Finally, this study draws attention to how the essays constitute a theater in which the pursuit of thought plays itself out in the mind’s “I”. More often than not the eye sees by imagining that which is not visible. If Montaigne’s writerly project returns to the metaphor of sight, it is in order to demonstrate the visual agency that allows us to bring things to light through the mind’s “I”. The exemplarity of the Montaignian imagination teaches us that we can transcend the dominant positivism of our current age by seeing things otherwise.