‘Intelligible sans discipline’: Enumeration, Observation, and Communication in Montaigne's ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’

Abstract

Montaigne is famously resistant to labels. He denies that he is or would wish to be a philosopher and belittles his own efforts as a poet. This reluctance to categorize himself along disciplinary lines is mirrored in his methodology. As Michel Jeanneret has observed, in the Essais he 'tended to reject the rational, premeditated structures and logical mechanisms taught in school', while he claims to be unable to master the metrical rules essential to poetry, remarking that 'je fay [ ... ] I' enfant quand j 'y veux mettre la main'. I The writing that results from this resistance to structures and disciplines, Jeanneret suggests, is characterized by a 'poetics of instant outpouring', a trait that is evident both in the composition of chapters and on the level of syntax. Picking up on Jeanneret's notion, this article examines the role in Montaigne's work of a particular instance of his 'poetics of outpouring', the paratactic, iterative, and disjunctive structure that is the list. The Essais are fundamentally and conceptually enumerative in that their stated aim is to record the particulars of experience as observed over time. They are best represented not by the celebrated notion of the self-portrait but by Montaigne's own image of his writing as a 'contrerolle', a register, or inventory. This replaces his earlier painting metaphor and suggests a self-presentation that is accumulative and open-ended, like a list.] Generically, meanwhile, Montaigne's debt to the