NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, 2 vols., ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957). Henceforth all parenthetical text references will be to these editions.

2. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Critique 282 (November 1970): 908. On the relationship of the visual to theory, see Rodolphe Gasché, “Theatrum Thorecticum,” in The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 188–208.

3. Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle, 7 vols. (Paris: Librairie Arienne Edouard Champion, 1925–67), available online at http://www.champion-electronique.net.

4. On Montaigne and the imagination, see the following: Tom Conley, “An Allegory of Prudence,” Montaigne Studies 4 (1992): 156 –79; idem, “Montaigne Moqueur: ‘Virgile’ and Its Geographies of Gender,” in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, ed. Kathleen P. Long (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2001), 93–106; Claude-Gilbert Dubois, L ’ Imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985); Ann Hartle, Michel de Montaigne: Accidential Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); John D. Lyons, “Ethics, Imagination, and Surprise,” Montaigne Studies 14 (2002): 95–204; Glyn Norton, Montaigne and the Introspective Mind (The Hague, Neth.: Mouton, 1975); John O’Brien, “Reasoning with the Senses: The Humanist Imagination,” South Central Review 10, no. 2 (1993): 3–20; Dora E. Polachek, “Montaigne and the Imagination: The Dynamics of Power and Control,” Le Parcours des “Essais”: Montaigne, 1588–1988, ed. Marcel Tetel and G. Mallary Masters (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989), 135– 45; Jean Starobinski, “Imagination,” in Actes de l ’ association de littérature comparée, ed. François Jost (The Hague, Neth.: Mouton, 1966), 952–63. On the concept of the imagination in the Renaissance, see Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, De Imaginatione (Venice, 1501; Strasbourg, 1507); trans. Antoine de Baif as Traité de l ’ imagination (Paris: Weschel, 1557).

5. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968).

6. Richard Regosin, Montaigne ’ s Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 84.

7. See Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of the Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 12 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927).

8. See Aristotle, “On the Soul,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Bollingen Series, 71, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 641–92. See also Malcolm Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” in Essays on Aristotle ’ s “ De Anima, ” ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 641–92.

9. Pierre de La Primaudaye regards the imagination from an anti-Aristotelian perspective. See Suite de l’Académie Française (Paris: Guillaume Chaudière, 1580).

10. John Lyons, Before Imagination (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

11. On the themes of metamorphosis and motion, see the following: Jean Starobinski , Montaigne en mouvement (Paris: Gallimard, 1982); François Rigolot, Les Métamorphoses de Montaigne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Michel Jeanneret , Perpetuum Mobile: Métamorphoses des corps et des œuvres, de Vinci à Montaigne (Paris: Macula, 1997) [English: Perpetuel Motion: Transformative Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nina Pollen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)]. One of the most compelling analyses of the kinetic nature of the Essays is presented by Tom Conley: “Poetic fragments of a ‘primary’ process of association break the finished look of a prose into arcane figures, or miniature ‘testes’ letters that jumble and move indiscriminately or atom istically about the essays. An unconscious is glimpsed through the gaps and crannies opened by the visible art of writing.” The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 119.

12. See Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

13. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires — for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lind-say, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 34.

14. John O’Brien, “Seeing the Dead: The Gaze as Commemoration,” Montaigne Studies 4 (Sept. 1992): 97–110.

15. Jacques Derrida, “Roland Barthes,” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 36.

16. Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” in Michel de Montaigne: Modern Critical Views, editor Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsen House, 1987), 5.

CHAPTER 1.  MONTAIGNE’S FANTASTIC MONSTERS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER

1. See the entry “ chimeres” in Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968). Mary B. McKinley discusses the agonistic encounter between Montaigne’s essay on idleness and Epistle 2 of Horace’s Ars poetica in Words in a Corner: Studies in Montaigne ’ s Latin Quotations, French Forum Monographs, 26 (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1981). By focusing on the Latin quotation “ velut aegri somnia, / vanae Finguntur species, ” she suggests that Montaigne violates Horace’s warning against trying to combine “the wild with the tame” in a work of art (37– 40). Michel Jeanneret’s commentary concerning the excessive nature of Rabelais’s writing is in some ways applicable to Montaigne as well: “Il [l’excès] parasite les grilles interprétatives étroites, il déstabilise la lecture et, du même coup, la stimule. Se joue ainsi le devenir de l’œuvre. L’excédent des sens possibles fait de la lecture une opération sans fin—recherche d’une totalisation irréalisable, défi permanent qui maintient vivante la productivité du texte.” Michel Jeanneret, “Débordements rabelaisiens,” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 43 (1991): 123.

2. Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Montaigne’s Family Romance,” in The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 73–92. See also Glyn P. Norton, Montaigne and the Introspective Mind (The Hague, Neth.: Mouton, 1975), 28–32.

3. According to Robert D. Cottrell, “ Desreglement is the menace of emasculation, the threat of irresolution that is an ever-present danger and that signals the dissolution of the only thing ‘really in our power’— our will—and thus, to the extent that being is identified with manliness and steadfastness, the dissolution of being itself.” Sexuality/Textuality: A Study of the Fabric of Montaigne ’ s “Essais” (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981), 25. Cottrell sees in Montaigne’s text a binary tension between “the masculine ethics of stiffness and the feminine ethics of laxness” (39).

4. Richard L. Regosin has stated: “Montaigne’s monster is that which is shown and which shows itself, that which shows what it is, that it is.” “Montaigne’s Monstrous Confession,” Montaigne Studies 1 (1989): 77. While Regosin’s analysis deals with the “play of language,” I have chosen to focus on the issue of gender representation. In the chapter “L’Essai, corps monstrueux” (in Montaigne: l ’ écriture de l ’ essai [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988] 221– 40) Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani examines Montaigne’s text as an emblem for the multilayered form the essay takes. She pays particular attention to narrative structure and intertextuality and the function of quotation. See also Fausta Garavini, “La Présence des ‘monstres’ dans l’élaboration des Essais: A propos de I, iii, ‘Nos affections s’emportent audelà de nous,’” in Le Parcours des “Essais”: Montaigne, 1588–1988, ed. Marcel Tetel and G. Mallary Masters (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989), 33– 46; Qu ’ est-ce qu ’ un monstre, ed. Annie Ibrahim (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005).

5. According to John D. Lyons, “Difference is here converted into an effect of distance. Life becomes a kind of gigantic anamorphic painting that we can never see from the proper distance.” Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 137.

6. For a thematic approach to the imagination, see Dora Pollachek, “Montaigne and Imagination: The Dynamics of Power and Control,” in Le Parcours des “Essais”, 135– 45.

7. In Foucault’s late work sexuality is conceived as a work of art. See, e.g., Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

8. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 224.

9. Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 32.

10. My analyses here differ from those found in Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), which focuses on the concept of the “one-sex model” in early modern texts. Laqueur tends to read Montaigne’s allegorical examples in a somewhat literal fashion. In an otherwise remarkable study, I find some indecision in his movement between the real and the representational. Montaigne may well “refuse to come to rest on the question of what is imaginative and what is real” (128), but isn’t the representation of the “real” in the essay just another level of the fiction-making process or what might be termed an allegory of the essayist’s own gender quest?

11. Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, 38.

12. Ibid., 39.

13. According to Jacques Lacan, “the phallus is a signifier … whose function in the intra-subjective economy of the analysis lifts the veil, perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries. For it is the signifier destined to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier.” “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 285.

14. For a discussion of the impotence topos within the context of cultural history, see Lee R. Entin-Bates, “Montaigne’s Remarks on Impotence,” Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 640 –54.

15. Henri Gelin, “Les Noueries d’aiguillette en Poitou,” Revue des Etudes Rabelaisiennes 8 (1910): 122. For the physician Paré impotence could have demonological roots: “Nouer l’esguillette, et les paroles ne font rien, mais c’est l’austuce du diable. Et ceulx qui la nouent ne le peuvent faire sans avoir eu convention avec le diable, qui est une meschancé damnable.” “Des Noueurs d’esguillette,” quoted in Des monstres et des prodiges, ed. Jean Céard (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 100.

16. Lyons, Exemplum, 141.

17. Elsewhere I have discussed other aspects of manliness in Montaigne’s Essays. See the chapter “Pedagogical Graffiti and the Rhetoric of Conceit,” in The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 57–72. See also Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture, North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages, no. 283 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

CHAPTER 2.  REPRESENTING THE MONSTER

1. “Elle [la correction du Calendrier] ne fut non plus miracle … combien que beaucoup de simples gens l’estiment fort merveilleuse.” Louis Richeome, Trois discours pour la religion catholique, des miracles, des saincts & des images (Bordeaux: S. Millanges, 1597), 41. See R. M. Calder, “Montaigne, ‘Des Boyteux’ and the Question of Causality,” Bibliothèque d ’ humanisme et Renaissance 45 (1983): 446 n. 4.

2. On the intersection of the miracle-monster topoi, I have benefited greatly from Richard L. Regosin’s analyses in “Montaigne’s Monstrous Confession,” Montaigne Studies 1 (1989): 73–87. For Regosin “this is an essay about seeing, about witnessing and bearing witness to phenomena which are often characterized as miracles and which the essayist, against the pressure of common opinion, would reinscribe in the domain of nature or on which he would reserve judgment altogether” (78).

3. Ibid., 77.

4. See chapter 1 of the present study. In Des monstres, des prodiges, des voyages (Paris: Livre Club du Libraire, 1964), the sixteenth-century French physician Ambroise Paré proclaims: “Monstres sont choses qui apparaissent outre le cours de Nature (& sont le plus souvent signes de quelque malheur à venir” (181). On the use of the monster metaphor in Montaigne’s Essays, see the following: Mary B. McKinley, Words in a Corner: Studies in Montaigne ’ s Latin Quotations, French Forum Monographs, 26 (Lexing-ton, Ky.: French Forum, 1981); Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, Montaigne: De l ’ écriture de l ’ essai (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Fausta Garavini, “La Présence des monstres dans l’élaboration des Essais à propos de I, iii, ‘Nos affections s’emportent au-dela de nous,’” in Le Parcours des “Essais”: Montaigne, 1588 – 1988, ed. Marcel Tetel and G. Mallary Masters (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989), 33– 46. John D. Lyons has treated the question of the exemplary value of monstrosity in Montaigne’s essays in Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). For a general discussion of the monster in literary production, see Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). The most important book on the concept of the monster in the Renaissance is Jean Céard’s La Nature et les prodiges (Geneva: Droz, 1977). See also Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, “Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England,” Past and Present 92 (1981): 20 –54.

5. See Calder, “Montaigne,” 452–54.

6. Jean Bodin, De la demonomanie des sourciers (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1580).

7. Richard A. Sayce, The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 248.

8. According to Marianne S. Meijer, “It is not so much the poor witches who go beyond the natural, as the learned among us… . Through science, man goes beyond the natural and becomes unwise.” “Guesswork or Facts: Connection between Montaigne’s Last Three Chapters (III:11, 12 and 13),” Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 177.

9. Floyd F. Gray comments: “Le vrai monstre, c’est l’oeuvre qu’il sort de lui-même qui contemple cette oeuvre, née comme hors de lui, en dépit de son désir de modération et d’ordre.” La Balance de Montaigne: Exagium, essai (Paris: Nizet, 1982), 50.

10. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19. On Montaigne’s testimony at the Martin Guerre trial in Toulouse, see Emile V. Telle, “Montaigne et le procès Martin Guerre,” Bibliothèque d ’ humanisme et Renaissance 37 (1975): 387– 419.

11. Davis notes: “For a while Martin and his family might have hoped the impotence would pass… . Still nothing happened. Bertrande’s family was pressing her to separate from Martin; since the marriage was unconsummated, it could be dissolved after three years and she would be free by canon law to marry again. It was humiliating, and the village surely let them know about it.” The Return of Martin Guerre, 20.

12. According to Tom Conley, “In ‘Des boyteux’ [Of cripples] Montaigne chooses III, xi to classify the chapter on sorcery. It happens that eleven is the digit of the devil because the integer 1 is doubled into 11; but when the author remarks that 10 days have been added to the Gregorian calendar in October 1582, the numerical count can be as much as 10 or 11 days, the number matching the ‘bissextile’ tension of the chapter.” The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118–19.

13. Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture, North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages, 283 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

14. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).Todd Reeser

15. Stephen Greenblatt, “Limping Examples: Exemplarity, the New Historicism, and Psychoanalysis,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 281–95. See also Carla Freccero, “Psychoanalysis, Montaigne and the Melancholic Subject of Humanism,” Montaigne Studies 9 (1997): 17–34; and my essay “Montaigne et la psychanalyse, in Dictionnaire Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (Paris: Champion, 2004). On the question of ethics in this essay, see Zahi Zalloura, “The Ethics of Montaigne’s Des Boyteux: The Case of Martin Guerre,” Yearbook of Comparative and general Literature 51 (2003– 4), 69–84.

16. John O’Brien, “Suspended Sentences,” in Le Visage Changeant de Montaigne / The Changing Face of Montaigne, ed. Keith Cameron and Laura Willett (Paris: Champion, 2003), 92.

CHAPTER 3.  MONTAIGNE’S FRATERNITY

1. Etienne de La Boétie, Discours de la Servitude Volontaire, ed. Simone Goyard-Fabre (Paris: Flammarion, 1983) [English: On Voluntary Servitude, trans. David Lewis Schaefer, in Freedom Over Servitude, ed. D. L. Schaefer (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 189–222. Henceforth all parenthetical text references will be to these editions.

2. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans.George Collins (New York : Verso, 1997) [French: Politiques de l ’ amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994)].

3. On this point see Stephen Greenblatt, “Montaigne Witnesses the Death of His Friend Etienne de La Boétie,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 224. Marc D. Schachter sees the relationship between Montaigne and La Boétie as based on “a kind of hybrid of love and friendship.” “The Friendship Which Possesses the Soul: Montaigne Loves La Boétie,” Journal of Homosexuality 3– 4 (2001): 6. See also see Nancy Freilick, “Friendship, Transference, and Voluntary Servitude,” in The Changing Face of Montaigne, ed. Keith Cameron and Laura Willet (Paris: Champion, 2003), 195–206.

4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 123.

5. Trevor Hope, “Sexual Indifference and the Homosexual Male Imaginary” Diacritics 24 (1994): 170. On the homosocial in Montaigne, see Carla Freccero, “Psychoanalysis, Montaigne and the Melancholic Subject of Humanism,” Montaigne Studies 9 (1997): 17–34.

6. Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66.

7. Montaigne, Michel de. “Extraict d’une lettre,” in Œuvres com-plètes, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade/Gallimard, 1962), 1247–60.

8. The source is the same as the one cited in the epigraph to this chapter.

9. Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 1965), 79.

10. According to Jean-Michel Delacompté, “L’amitié, sanctuaire de notre liberté volontaire, c’est-à-dire qui ne dépend que de nous, par un re-fus, par un arrachement aux contraintes d’autrui qui nous environnent.” Et qu ’ un seul soit l ’ ami (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 181.

CHAPTER 4.  MONTAIGNE ON HORSEBACK, OR THE SIMULATION OF DEATH

This essay was translated from the French by Malcolm Debevoise .

1. On the idea of balance, see Floyd F. Gray, La Balance de Montaigne: Exagium, essai (Paris: Nizet, 1982).

2. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962).

3. On the theme of falling, see the following: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Richard L. Regosin, Montaigne ’ s Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Laurent Jenny, “Histoire d’une chute,” in L ’ Expérience de la chute: De Montaigne à Michaux (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), 30 –37; and Michel Jeanneret, Perpetuum mobile: Métamorphoses des corps et des œuvres, de Vinci à Montaigne (Paris: Macula, 1997).

4. I have profited greatly from Derrida’s theoretical analysis of death in his Apories: mourir — s ’ attendre aux “ limites de la vérité ” (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 25. With respect to “the experience of aporia,” Derrida asks: “Que serait une telle expérience ? Le mot signifie aussi passage, traversée, endurance, épreuve du franchissement, mais peut-être une traversée sans ligne et sans frontière indivisible (35) (“What is this expérience ? The word also signifies passage, crossing, endurance, the ordeal of crossing over, but perhaps a crossing over without a line, without an indivisible boundary” [35]).

5. Tom Conley, The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 125.

6. Jenny asks: “Must it be admitted that the shock to the soul and the return to the world coincided in a single oxymoronic moment?” in “L’expérience de la chute,” 35.

7. Marcel Tetel, Présences italiennes dans les “Essais” de Montaigne (Paris: Champion, 1992), 130.

CHAPTER 5.  THE ANXIETY OF DEATH

1. See Jean-Paul Sermain, “ Insinuatio, circumstantia, visio et actio: L’Itinéraire rhétorique du chapitre III, 4: ‘De la Diversion,’” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 7 (1985): 127.

2. See my chapter “Montaigne’s Family Romance,” in The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 73–92. See also my essay “Montaigne and Psychoanalysis,” in Approaches to Teaching Montaigne ’ s “ Essays, ” ed. Pat-rick Henry (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1993), 110 –16.

3. Montaigne made this addition to the 1588 edition of the Essais in the essay entitled “De la vanité” (III, 9). I am here using Frame’s translation, p. 752, n. 14.

4. Richard Regosin, “Sources and Resources: The ‘Pretexts’ of Originality in Montaigne’s Essais, ” Substance 21 (1978): 114.

5. Randle Cotgrave defines the verb “ruser” as: “to beguile, to deceive, to shift, to use tricks, to deale cunningly, to proceed by sleghts.” A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968).

6. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), 166.

7. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961 ) , 147.

CHAPTER 6.  EXCAVATING MONTAIGNE

1. See Lawrence D. Kritzman, “Montaigne’s Family Romance,” in The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 73–92.

2. See Marjorie Henry Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance: Marie le Jars de Gournay: Her Life and Her Works (The Hague, Neth.: Mouton, 1963); see also Elayne Dezon-Jones, Fragments d ’ un discours féminin (Paris: Corti, 1988).

3. Richard Regosin, “Montaigne and His Readers,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 248–53.

4. “Préface de Marie de Gournay à l’édition de 1595 des ‘Essais,’” ed. François Rigolot, Montaigne Studies 1 (1989): 53. Subsequent references to this edition are identified parenthetically in the text. I have also consulted the “Préface” of the 1595 L’Angelier edition housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

5. Inscription in Montaigne’s library. See “Chronologie de Montaigne,” in Montaigne, Œuvres complètes , ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1962), xvi–xvii.

6. According to Rigolot, “Elle [Marie de Gournay] se présente sans hésiter comme l’éditrice idéale des Essais, à la fois parce qu’elle a connu leur auteur personnellement et dans l’intimité (elle peut donc, en cas d’ambiguité, restituer les “intentions” de Montaigne dans leur pureté), parce qu’elle s’est refusée à corriger le texte par respect pour la volonté de son ‘Père’ et en-fin, tout simplement, parce que l’amour filial qui l’habite compensera toute défaillance éventuelle de sa part (‘mon affection suppléant à mon incapacité’)” (11).

7. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 100.

8. According to Tilde A. Sankovitch, “It is she who conceives a desire for him—that is, for the Book he incarnates—and it is she who takes possession of the Essays in an ecstasy, a trance, of pleasure.” “Marie le Jars de Gournay: The Self-portrait of an Androgynous Hero,” in French Women Writers and the Book (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 78.

9. On Marie de Gournay as a reader, see Cathleen Bauschatz, “Marie de Gournay’s ‘Préface de 1595’: A Critical Evaluation,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, 7th ser., 3– 4 (Jan.–June 1986): 73–82.

10. This phrase is borrowed from Julia Kristeva‘s New Maladies of the Soul (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

11. Quoted in Dezon-Jones, Fragments, 193.

12. Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 276.

13. Sankovitch, “Marie le Jars de Gournay,” discusses her own coming of age in terms of a “mimicry of ritual initiation” (79).

14. Quoted in Alan Boase, The Fortunes of Montaigne: A History of the Essays in France, 1580 – 1669 (London: Methuen, 1935), 52.

15. Quoted in Richard Regosin, “Montaigne’s Dutiful Daughter,” in Montaigne ’ s Unruly Brood: Textual Engenderings, Monstrous Progeny, and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 78. Regosin states: “I would argue that Marie de Gournay is guilty of having misspoken, and more seriously, that she is guilty of having spoken at all” (52).

16. “Preface de Marie de Gournay,” 27.

CHAPTER 7.   THE SOCRATIC MAKEOVER

1. Among the more interesting analyses of the essay, see the following: Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 302–12; Hope Glidden, “The Face in the Text: Montaigne’s Emblematic Self-portrait (Essais III:12),” Renaissance Quarterly 46, no. 1 (1993): 71–79; David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); Joshua Scodel, “The Affirmation of Paradox: A Reading of Montaigne’s ‘De la Phisionomie’ (III, 12),” Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 209–37; and Zahi Zalloua, Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (Charlottesville, N.C.: Rockwood Press, 2005).

2. See the following treatises: Barthélemy Coclès, Physiognomania (1533); Michel Lescot, Physionomie (1540); and Jean d’Indagine, Chiromance (1549).

3. Raymond La Charité, “Montaigne’s Silenic Text: ‘De la phisionomie,’ in Le Parcours des Essais: Montaigne, 1588–1988, ed. Marcel Tetel and

G. Mallary Masters (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989), 66 –67.

4. Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy, 133.

5. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 12.

6. Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 128.

7. On the role of Xenophon, see Floyd Gray, “Montaigne and the Memorabilia,” Studies in Philology 58 (1961): 130 –39.

8. According to Zalloua, “‘De la phisionomie’ at once tests and attests to the essayist’s ethical relation to the other. In his writing of Socrates, Montaigne … resists this ‘natural,’ or rather naturalized, hermeneutic impulse … to encapsulate the meaning of his ideal other, to inscribe Socrates unproblematically in any preestablished and authorized lineages or discourses … to portray him as an unequivocal being” ( Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism, 63).

9. See Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 63.

10. As Slavoj Zizek has concluded, “Every recognition of the subject in an image or signifying trait … already betrays its core; every jubilant ‘that is me’ already contains the seed of ‘that’s not me.’” The Parallax View (Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 2006), 244.

CHAPTER 8.  ROMANCING THE STONE

1. Gérard Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: L ’ Ecriture comme présence, Geneva: Slatkine, 1987); Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. Robert Rovini (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). The same logocentric readings persist even today. For example, in his introduction Ulrich Langer has stated that “Montaigne himself is always present.” The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, ed. Ulrich Langer (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2.

2. See Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, vol. 2 (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1958); Albert Thibaudet, Montaigne, ed. Floyd Gray (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).

3. Richard L. Regosin, “The Text of Memory’s Experience as Narration in Montaigne’s Essays,” in The Dialectic of Discovery, ed. John D. Lyons and Nancy L. Vickers (Lexington, Ky. and Indianapolis, Ind.: French Forum, 1984 ) , 105.

4. Jacques Derrida, Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994).

5. See Robert Cottrell, “Representation and the Desiring Subject in Montaigne’s ‘De l’experience,’” in Le Parcours des Essais: Montaigne, 1588–1988, ed. Marcel Tetel and G. Mallary Masters (Paris: Aux Amateur de Livres, 1989), 97–109.

6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 163 n. 43.

7. Lawrence Kritzman, “Montaigne et l’écriture excrementale,” in Destruction/Découverte: Le fonctionnement de la rhétorique dans les “Es-sais” de Montaigne (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1980), 147– 49; see also Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, Montaigne: L ’ écriture de l ’ essai (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988).

8. Antoine Compagnon, Nous: Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

9. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 17:240.

10. See Jules Brody, “Les Oreilles de Montaigne,” Romanic Review 74 (1983):121–35.

11. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989).

12. Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Robin Waterfield, ed. Robin Waterfield (New York: Penguin, 1990). See also The Socratic Movement, ed. Paul Vander-Waerdt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

13. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9.

14. Petronius, Satyricon and the Apocologyntosis, trans. J. P. Sullivan (New York: Penguin, 2005).

15. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), 313.

16. Floyd F. Gray, Gender, Rhetoric and Print-Culture in French Renaissance Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134– 42.

17. Martial, Epigrams, ed. D. B. Shackelton Bailey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3.

18. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tar-nowski (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 67. According to Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani , “S’arrêter à ce qui n’est pas, mais peut être, feindre les choses, concevoir les formes de toutes choses qui se peuvent imaginer, représenter les choses qui peuvent être vraisemblables, bâtir son ouvrage sur le possible … si telle est la definition de la poésie, elle n’est pas si éloignée de l’essai idéal, de l’essai tel qu’il se rêve.” Montaigne ou la verité du mensonge (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 42.

19. Jacques Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan—Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 319.