Civilizing Subjects, or Not: Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Agamben’s Exception, and Human Rights after Derrida

Abstract

We would have subtitled this chapter, “Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Foucault’s Biopower, Agamben’s Exception, Rancière’s Dissensus, Boltanski’s Multiplicities, and Human Rights after Arendt, Habermas, and Derrida,” but we are not so expansive as to lose all concern for style or credibility. And yet, it is the desire to involve ourselves in the conversation with all these discourses on power, individuals, and politics that drives our analysis of two early modern texts on civilizing subjects: Simon Marion’s virtually unknown Pleas by Mister Simon Marion, lawyer of the Parliament …,(1587), compared to Michel de Montaigne’s extremely well-known “Of Cannibals” (Bordeaux 1580; Paris 1588, etc.). We take Marion’s plea to represent widespread consensus (were it otherwise, it would not have worked in support of his legal argument), while Montaigne’s text may well represent a possibly less widespread position at the time, and its popularity today is due to the fact that it appears uncannily to anticipate twentieth-century anthropological relativism. Epic frescoes start in medias res, and we begin ours at midpoint between 1587 and the present, in 1789, not because of any wish to create suspense, but quite the opposite, to cleave as closely as possible to the common ground of the twentieth-and twenty-first century texts we evoke.KeywordsEighteenth CenturyFrench RevolutionSubjective TerritoryEarly Modern PeriodSovereign PowerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.