The Self-Devouring Self: Montaigne's Anti-Influential Model of Identity

Abstract

work of a painter: it is myself I am painting.2 To paint oneself must then be to manipulate one's 'matter' in such a way that it becomes a book. When the man Montaigne no longer exists (having lost me3), the book, the picture, will remain, on the other side of the 'equation,' and retain the 'shape' of the 'matter' that went into them the 'matter' and the 'manner' (which I would define for the moment as the changes worked on and in the 'matter' as it passes from one side of the equivalency to the other) of Montaigne. It might be objected that by 'matter' he means simply 'subject.' But subject is an ambiguous word in its own right and this would not simplify matters (sic) at all. The word matiere comes from the Latin materia, materies, the first meaning of which was stuff of which anything is composed, lumber for building, or for fuel (Cassell's Latin Dictionary, Petit Robert) either a raw substance from which some finished product is extracted, constructed, or from which energy may be coaxed to some useful end. A thing more or less worthless as is, in itself, which has value only as it fits into a process of shaping or consuming. In one manner or another, the concept of matter is always tied to the concept of shape manner. The Petit Robert, for instance, cites as one meaning of 'matter,' the indeterminate depth of being which form organizes.4 To say that one is the matter of something outside of oneself is to reduce the self to a kind of raw material, not a form but something susceptible of being formalized and be-