Montaigne's Essays Research Articles

Features of the Mongolian translation of some of Michel de Montaigne's essays translated from French

Features of the Mongolian translation of some of Michel de Montaigne's essays translated from French

The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy by Donald Phillip Verene

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy by Donald Phillip Verene Jeffrey Dirk Wilson VERENE, Donald Phillip. The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. xiii + 139 pp. Cloth, $49.95 Rhetoric gives philosophy the ability to speak. Philosophy gives rhetoric something to say. They are mutually indispensable, and their rivalry at times descends into enmity. There are also occasions when only the one can rescue the other from catastrophe. Those are the overarching dynamics of Verene's book. There is an introduction, then two parts, "Prolegomena Philosophiae," comprising four chapters, and "Three Rhetorics," comprising three chapters, followed by an epilogue, notes, and an index. Though Verene does not mention Hume in the introduction—and only twice in the book otherwise—it is difficult not to think of him when Verene speaks of philosophy as "a theater of memory," as if correcting Hume's "theater of the mind." It is also corrective to presentism, often attributed to Hume, when Verene claims that a chief task of the philosopher "is to keep us from always living in the present. For this labor to be accomplished the philosopher must go to school with both the poets and the orators." Rhetoric, rightly understood, helps philosophy to remain philosophy and prevents it from becoming sophistry. In chapter 1, "Philosophical Thinking," Verene reminds the reader that mortality is not a choice. The bounded nature of human life leads to the pursuit of happiness and, therefore, also to the pursuit of meaning. The human responds in two ways, by creating both arguments and stories, but arguments as well as stories need words. The "and yet" comes in the second chapter, "Philosophy and the Muses." Verene writes, "The philosopher knows that the real always outstrips language." Philosophy and its kin, poetry, point beyond themselves. Writing is remembering, but what is written, even at its best, can never capture all that is remembered, and memory, even at its best, can never capture all that is. In "Philosophy and Eloquence," Verene maps a way of escaping Kant. Modern philosophy rejects rhetoric and memory in its pursuit of novelty as progress. Verene introduces the concept of ingenium, "a power philosophy shares with rhetoric." It "is the ability to perceive similarity in dissimilars. . . . the power to produce metaphor" and irony. Metaphor and irony are philosophy's response to the stale univocal predication of critical thinking that Verene sees as the reduction of reality to an analytic concept. In "Philosophical Style," he shows that as soon as a subject is joined to a predicate, the subject ceases to be only what it was. The predicate is an [End Page 369] otherness that is pulled into the subject such that ever after the subject has an inner dialectic. "The ball is red" is generative of a ball that is not merely a ball but also something else, something foreign to its ballness. The ball gives up nothing of what it was but, rather, gains something that it was not, and yet not in the deterministic way of necessity. The ball does not have to be red, but if it is red, then "ball" and "red" constitute an inner dialectic. The ball is red predicatively and not tautologically, but separating out the kinds of predication does not exhaust all the mystery of the inner dialectic; nothing can. The three rhetorics are of "Self-Discourse," "Absolute Thought," and "The Philosophical Frontispiece." These are chapters respectively about speech appertaining to man, God, and the political entity, though each considered slant rather than head-on. Verene juxtaposes Descartes and Vico with respect to self-discourse. Descartes reframes the human being in terms of the first-person singular pronoun, thereby transforming the personal into the categorical. Vico responds by writing not an "autobiography" but, rather, The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself, thereby transforming the pronoun for the other, "he," into the self-identifier. There follows an essay on the essay and especially on the essays of Montaigne as autobiography. "To think," Verene writes, "is to move ideas in relation to each other and thus to illuminate what comes before the mind in experience." What emerges is a dialectic between the "I" and...

Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers by Brian C. Ribeiro

Reviewed by: Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers by Brian C. Ribeiro Jerry Green RIBEIRO, Brian C. Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers. Leiden: Brill, 2021. ix + 165 pp. Cloth, $145.00; eBook, $149.00 As the title suggests, this short, engaging work explores a continuity between three major thinkers in the Western skeptical tradition. The label "Pyrrhonizers" is well chosen: What draws Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, and Hume together is a set of attitudes about the limits of reason and the value of constant inquiry. These thinkers are united not by commitment to a set of propositions that would group them together in some kind of static philosophical school but, rather, by a kind of pessimism about rationality's power. Ribeiro uses these figures to prompt a thought-provoking inversion of a traditional challenge to skepticism: Not only is it possible for a skeptic to live his skepticism, it is also unexpectedly easy to do so, because rationality has a surprisingly weak hold on us. This means that we can continue to be skeptics even when we cannot bring ourselves to believe or reject dogmatic claims, so long as we continue to pyrrhonize. Chapter 1 is a defense of the psychological reality of epistemic akrasia, a phenomenon by which an epistemic agent fails to form beliefs governed by the evidence she takes herself to have (analogous to the more familiar weakness of will in moral psychology). In particular, Ribeiro focuses on skeptical cases where one takes oneself to have sufficient reason to suspend judgment regarding p but nevertheless persists in believing that p. This chapter engages with contemporary literature in epistemology that [End Page 158] denies the possibility of epistemic akrasia; Ribeiro points to real cases of the phenomenon to show that it is an actual occurrence in human psychology. Chapter 2 surveys the three eponymous subjects of the book, arguing that Sextus, Montaigne, and Hume are engaged in a single, historically continuous project regarding epistemic agency and human reason-responsiveness. Whatever differences these three figures may have, each is interested in probing the boundaries of belief, looking for the borders of rationality where our beliefs persist even in the face of evidence or arguments against them. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the version of Pyrrhonian skepticism found in Sextus Empiricus. Ribeiro argues that Sextus saw global suspension of belief as an ethical ideal conducive to tranquility and hence eudaimonia. Comparable to the Stoic moral sage, this ideal may not be fully realizable in actual life, but one can nevertheless make progress toward this ideal. Crucially, this progress is compatible with intractable beliefs about which suspension of judgment is difficult or fleeting: Even if one cannot globally suspend judgment about all matters at once, one can still become increasingly more tranquil as one develops the ability to suspend judgment more successfully over time. Chapter 4 transitions to Montaigne's Essays. Ribeiro devotes the bulk of the chapter to showing that Montaigne was explicitly influenced by ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism (via both Sextus and Cicero). The most important point, however, is that Montaigne exemplifies the Pyrrhonian project in his constant revisions to his Essays throughout his life, modeling the zetetic approach of perpetual investigation. Montaigne's chief contribution to this project is to redirect it away from the dogmatic disputes over unclear matters that we see among the ancient skeptics, and toward continual autobiographical self-reflection. Chapter 5 pauses the historical focus of the previous chapters, to return to the topic of human rationality. This chapter uses a Humean observation of the power of custom or habit compared to reason to argue that human rational self-control is surprisingly weak. Similar to the worry about epistemic akrasia discussed in chapter 1, here Ribeiro uses the plausibility of certain skeptical arguments to suggest that we may lack the ability to form beliefs even when we take the arguments supporting those beliefs to be persuasive. Chapters 6 and 7 return to a historical focus, this time concentrating on Hume. Drawing on the work of Karánn Durland, chapter 6 argues that there is an irresolvable tension across Hume's works: In some places Hume endorses naturalism, in others skepticism. Ribeiro takes this to be further evidence for...

Marvels and Commonplaces in the Elizabethan Anthologies

Abstract In a brief essay on Cato the Younger, Montaigne draws together five excerpts from Latin verse in Cato's honour; by the time he returned to the essay in his final years, those excerpts elicited some of the author's richest remarks on poetry and the poetic sublime. This essay argues that the anthology, in its various shapes and forms, offered early modern readers a way of doing literary criticism. Taking its cue from Montaigne's essay, it focuses on a number of English anthologies, associated with John Bodenham, and often known as the ‘Wits’ series, printed at around the turn of the seventeenth century. It argues that the commonplace-book structure of these volumes acted as a spur to detailed stylistic analysis. Anthologies encouraged their readers to compare poets with one another, working out what they had in common, and what made each one distinct; in this, they fostered the sort of critical scrutiny discussed in Scaliger's Poetics, and put into practice in the theatrical exchanges of the ‘Poets' War’. But as in Montaigne's case, they could also spark reflections about those verses that lay beyond criticism's reach, in the numinous realm of the sublime.

"Some subtleties o'th' isle": Shakespeare's Tempest and Montaigne's Apologie of Raymond Sebond

A remarkable fact about William Shakespeare's The Tempest is that characters do not always see or hear the same thing. But while this estrangement of knowledge thins out the boundaries between character and environment to recognizably great dramatic effect, the aporetic energies underlying that estrangement are not yet fully understood. This article explores their significance by examining the connections between The Tempest and Michel de Montaigne's An Apologie of Raymond Sebond (long suspected to be related). It proposes a new verbal parallel between the play and the essay but does not confine its argument to such a criterion. Rather, it is a case study in the Renaissance practice of imitation that works from a number of aspects—shared matrices of thought and feeling, similar metaphors, networks of texts—to reconstruct the presence of a locus classicus of Renaissance skepticism in Shakespeare's late play. Along the way, it triangulates these works with a discussion of King Lear and examines the presence of Vergil and the possible presence of Seneca. It argues that Shakespeare used Montaigne's essay to make his island epistemologically strange and that this sensitive use of a philosophical source is notable for being so deeply dramatically embedded.

Montaigne: Founder of Modern Liberalism

In this essay David Lewis Schaefer summarizes and defends the argument set forth in his book The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Cornell University Press, 1990; second edition 2019) that Michele de Montaigne's Essays (first edition, 1580) merits consideration as a founding text of modern political liberalism. After responding to the most extensive published critique of his interpretation (by James Supple) and citing other recent studies that harmonize with his argument, Schaefer compares his analysis of Montaigne's political aims and political-ethical teaching with those set forth in two other recent studies: Philippe Desan's Montaigne: A Life and Pierre Manent's Montaigne: La Vie sans loi.

Editions of Mémoires d’outre-tombe

여러 필사본과 판본들이 존재하며, 작가 스스로 작품의 생성과정에 개입해서 ‘정본’을 정해놓지 않은 작품의 경우, 정본화와 비평본의 작업은 까다로운 작업으로 남는다. 몽테뉴의 󰡔에세󰡕, 보들레르의 󰡔악의 꽃󰡕 등 그 예는 무수히 많다. 샤토브리앙의 󰡔사후 회상록󰡕의 경우도 예외가 아니다. 샤토브리앙을 ‘문체의 마술사’로 자리매김하게 했던 이 작품이 걸었던 여정에는 그의 생애만큼이나 파란이 많았다. 1803년에 구상되어 1848년 작가가 생을 마감하는 순간까지 수정에 수정을 거듭했던 작품이었던 만큼, 다양한 필사본이 존재한다. 이 가운데 작품의 전체가 포함되어 있으며, 거의 최종적인 ‘1847년 공증 사본’이야말로 가장 신뢰할 수 있을 만한 원고라고 할 수 있다. 그럼에도 불구하고 초기의 판본들뿐만 아니라 20세기의 비평 판본들에서도 ‘공증 사본’을 전적으로 신뢰하지 않거나, 서로 다른 필사본들을 참고함으로써, 또 편집자들이 임의적인 첨삭과 수정을 가함으로써 서로 다른 󰡔사후 회상록󰡕 텍스트를 소개해왔음을 발견할 수 있다. 한 작품의 여러 판본들과 필사본들 속에서 우리는 어떤 판본을 정본으로 간주해야할지, 또 그 이유는 무엇일지에 대한 해결하기 어려운 문제들을 만나게 된다. 따라서 본 논문에 서는 󰡔사후 회상록󰡕의 필사본들과 판본들이 복잡하게 뒤얽혀 있는 미로들을 따라가면서 산일되어 있는 관련 정보들을 집적하고 체계적으로 정리함으로써 각 비평 판본들의 특징을 이해하는 데 주안점을 둘 것이다. 이는 차후에 이루어져야할 보다 생산적인 연구를 위한 필수적인 준비 작업에 다름 아니며, 현재까지 이루어진 비평 판본 작업들을 검토하는 가운데, 우리에게 남겨져 있는 과제들이 무엇일지에 대해 재고해 보는 데에도 본 논문의 목적이 있다.When a writer has not himself designated the final text, choosing a finalized text and establishing a critical edition remains a rather complicated matter. This was the case with both the Essays of Montaigne and the Flowers of Evil of Baudelaire, and Chateaubriand s Mémoires d outre-tombe is presents another example. In this paper, we will try to examine different versions of the manuscripts and texts of different editions in order to better understand the distinctive features of each edition. After careful consideration of the critical editions of the Mémoires d outre-tombe, we will also try to reflect on questions that have yet to be elucidated. This last work, which has given the author the nickname of enchanteur du style, has had vicissitudes which parallel those in the life of its author. Designed in 1803, this work was written in 1811 and the editing continued until the author s death. It is for this reason that there are different versions of the manuscripts. The 1832 manuscript, the 1841 manuscript, the 1845 manuscript, the 1847 notarial copy, and the 1848 manuscript are the main manuscripts extant today. Among these, the only one which contains the whole work and therefore remains reliable is the manuscript of 1847. However, from the first editions to the twentieth century editions, the publishers did not choose this manuscript as their main reference and took great liberties with some additions and corrections. They have, therefore, presented to us a different text of Memoires d outre-tombe.

SOBRE O ÚTIL E O HONESTO EM MONTAIGNE: ENTRE O ESTOICISMO E A RAZÃO DE ESTADO

Este trabalho se propõe a analisar o primeiro texto do terceiro livro dos Ensaios de Montaigne, intitulado “Do útil e do honesto”, estabelecendo um paralelo entre as ideias de Montaigne com, em primeiro plano, as construções do moralismo estoico bem como, com os preceitos desenvolvidos por Maquiavel. Com isso, pretendemos evidenciar que, no contexto político de sua época, Montaigne afirma a ideia de fides como elemento capaz de garantir a manutenção e a conservação das instituições políticas de modo mais eficaz que a simples ética de resultados professada pelos defensores dos argumentos da razão de Estado, unindo, portanto, tanto a moral estoica, quanto as correntes de pensamento de seu tempo.

Huet's interpretation of the Essays of Montaigne

Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), known today only by experts, was one of the main intellectuals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A distinguished Latinist who also knew Greek, ...

Voices of Dissent

VOICES OF DISSENT The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton by Richard Strier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 328. $46.00 cloth.Taking his cue, and virtually his book title, from Michel de Montaigne's essay Of Repentance (Du repentir), Richard Strier argues that major Renaissance, Reformation, and CounterReformation authors did not necessarily uphold what he calls official values of time: reason, patience, moderation of anger, subordination of physical to spiritual, ordinary decency and morality, rejection of materialism and worldliness, and assertion of need for humility. Authors could, on contrary, challenge all these values and often did. This argument recalled to my mind a moment in a Shakespeare Association of America seminar years ago in which a prominent English academic, having been hauled over coals by seminar members, finally said, Oh, I see. You want me to be humble. Well, I won't be.For Strier, official values represent a Christian-Platonic synthesis to which all were expected to subscribe. Strier wants to make case that, in being bumptious, full-throated, perhaps perverse (2),Renaissance and Reformation authors frequently proved recalcitrant, yet reader may already pull up short to ask, Who ever thought otherwise? Names like those of Pietro Aretino (surprisingly, not mentioned in book), Leon Battista Alberti, Michelangelo Buonarotti (as poet), Giordano Bruno (one footnote), Niccolo Machiavelli (passing reference), Galileo Galilei (passing reference), Pico della Mirandola (not mentioned, although the dignity of man looms large in book), Francois Rabelais (not mentioned), Benvenuto Cellini (passing reference), Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Ben Jonson are known to everyone and not known for tame acquiescence. (God forbid that we should recall painter Caravaggio here.) Even if one is not on lookout for more insurrectionary spirits, which major English Renaissance author was free of bumptiousness, fullthroatedness, or perversity? William Shakespeare? George Chapman? John Donne? Philip Sidney? John Marston? Thomas Middleton? Andrew Marvell?The question, then, is why Strier feels he has to argue a point that, on face of it, no one would dispute. Part of Strier's implied answer is that resistance to official values could be pursued on a principled, systematic basis. It wasn't just a matter of bad boys (or girls) acting out. (Regrettable, in a way, since resistance to official values thus tends to become more a matter of principled, civil debate than misbehavior.) If official values were Christian and Platonic, Renaissance authors could appeal against them to Aristotle for vindication of proper pride, of greatness of mind or soul, and of just self-estimation. Those values could be opposed to official ones on both ethical and worldly grounds; ethical in that they discountenanced excessive or futile self-abjection (not without its own overreaching vanity); worldly in that they gave credit to dignified social appearances. According to Strier, this ethical Aristotelianism placed humanistically schooled Renaissance writers implicitly, but nevertheless often and deeply, at odds with leading Protestant Reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, both of them insisting on radical human unworthiness and depravity. In reformers' book, repentance was certainly called for, even if it remained unavailing without grace. Yet even when a writer like John Milton marched under banner of Protestant Christianity, he remained, in Strier's view, an unrepentant Aristotelian. Strier additionally argues that even Neoplatonism of Plotinus could be enlisted against prevailing Christian-Platonic synthesis. Plotinus's conception of value, unlike Plato's, gave pride of place to multiplicity, diversity, and expansiveness rather than unity and circumscription. His conception of value can therefore be seen as underwriting triumph of infinite variety (2. …

Ferox or Fortis:

ABSTRACT Between the publication of Montaigne's Essais (1588–1595) and Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) rhetors became increasingly anxious about arguing in utramque partem. Paradiastolic discourse, fundamental to Montaigne's early essays, is anxiously though expertly deployed in Leviathan. Paradiastole fuses the ability to see and speak about an issue from antithetical perspectives with the ambivalence such power arouses in. Beyond their skepticism, Montaigne and Hobbes share a concern for how phenomena can be interpreted and represented through language. Despite Hobbes's desire for a method that would ensure constant and determinate linguistic acts that would render rhetoric supererogatory, Leviathan demonstrates his unremarkable affinities with mainline Renaissance humanists alongside his uneasy affinities with the Sophists. Both the humanist and the Sophist used the trope to probe and to persuade, though both were anxious about the reversibility of such rhetorical redescriptions. Paradiastolic discourses, we argue, integrate the cognitive procedures of philosophy with the judicative procedures of rhetoric. The trope operates through exploiting the reciprocity between similar qualities, as exemplified by the influential paradiastolic pairing of ferox and fortis.

From Draft to Infinite Writing. Death, Solitude and Self-creation in Early Modernity

This essay makes the argument that in order to live well one has to let death permeate one's life and, further, that one's approach to one's death and finitude can be part of a project of self-creation. The essay proceeds in several stages. First, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oratio de hominis dignitate, in which he talks of man's ‘unfinishedness’ as a mark of his privileged ontological status, is introduced and read as a foundational text of modernity. Then, the broader notion of ‘self-fashioning’, as a characteristically modern act, is discussed is some detail (with references to Giambattista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, Giuseppe Mazzotta and Stephen Greenblatt). This, in turn, creates the framework for a detailed examination of Montaigne's Essays, which is considered from two distinct angles: (a) as a preeminently performative text, the writing of which generates a process of self-creation in its author; and (b) as a text that makes the ‘domestication’ of death an imperative for the good life. At different points in the article, Luiz Costa-Lima's work (in particular The Limits of Voice and Control of the Imaginary) serves as a repertoire of theoretical solutions and source of interpretative keys.

Tableau Before the Law: Albert Camus' The Fall After Deconstruction

At the beginning of Derrida's ‘Before the Law’, a reading of Kafka's story with that title, is an epigraph from Montaigne's Essays: ‘… science does likewise (and even our law, it is said, has legitimate fictions on which it bases the truth of its justice)…’. Derrida again refers to this quotation in ‘Force of Law’, asking what a ‘legitimate fiction’ might be and what it would mean to establish the basis for the truth of justice. With reference to these writings on the status of narrative and the law, as well as to other texts by Derrida, this paper examines the story of the judge-penitent in Camus' The Fall and, in particular, this ironic reading of the aporetic experience of standing ‘before the law’. What does the narrative, The Fall, entail? Camus writes that the man who speaks in this text is involved in a ‘calculated confession’. How are the borders between truth and fiction, justice and the law, negotiated in this reckoning ‘before the law’?

Women's Writing and the Early Modern Genre Wars

This paper explores two phases of the early modern genre wars. The first was fought by Marie de Gournay, in her “Preface” to Montaigne's Essays, on behalf of her adoptive father and in defense of his naked and masculine prose. The second was fought half a century later by Nicholas Boileau in opposition to Gournay's feminizing successor, Madeleine de Scudéry. In this debate Gournay's position is egalitarian, whereas Scudéry's approximates to a feminism of difference. It is claimed that both female protagonists in this early debate occlude the female body. The far more sexually explicit prose of Mary Delarivier Manley is then used to raise the question: is it genre, or is it, rather, the very nature of erotic sexuality, that makes it so difficult for women to masterfully expose themselves as authoritative subjects?

O problema do ethos da escrita de si em Montaigne e em Petrarca: do ensaio à epístola

Montaigne insiste ao longo dos Ensaios em seu desprezo pela retórica. Mas como procuraremos mostrar aqui, sua "forma natural" inscreve-se em grande medida dentro dos termos da própria retórica, sob uma mobilização particular dos preceitos e convenções tradicionalmente apropriados à escrita em primeira pessoa, especialmente aqueles que regulavam o sermo familiaris, gênero recuperado pela primeira vez na Renascença por Petrarca. Retomamos assim, para desenvolvê-la, a fecunda intuição de Hugo Friedrich que, em sua clássica obra sobre os Ensaios de Montaigne, aponta o seu parentesco com a forma epistolar de Petrarca, sem, porém, acompanhá-lo quando distancia o ensaio da epístola familiar, por entendê-lo como marco de ruptura com os procedimentos da retórica e, assim, com toda a prosa artisticamente trabalhada do humanismo.

Método e estilo, subjetividade e conhecimento nos ensaios de Montaigne

A característica mais notável da filosofia renascentista foi também o que tornou sua assimilação pela história da filosofia tão difícil: a interação entre forma e conteúdo, entre ideia e sua expressão. Tal resulta da tentativa de realizar outra inter-relação que lhe é ainda mais essencial: aquela entre teoria e prática, pensamento e ação. Nos Ensaios de Montaigne, o método constitui antes de tudo um estilo de vida: a linguagem é aí o meio pelo qual a implicação entre mundos externos e internos, o eu e a realidade - assim entre intelecto e sensibilidade, arte e natureza, fato e valor, identidade e alteridade etc. - busca tornar-se evidente, permitindo a percepção de seu permanente remodelar recíproco.

Montaigne's "Cannibals" and The Tempest Revisited

Shakespeare's borrowing in The Tempest from Montaigne's essay "Cannibals" has been generally assumed to be concentrated in one short passage as given in John Florio's English translation (1603). This article demonstrates that the second half of Gonzalo's utopian speech in fact derives not from this famous passage but from another substantially longer one found two pages later in Florio's original folio text. It also proposes that Shakespeare had inspirations for the name and characterization of Sycorax as well as the setting of Prospero's island from this Montaigne-Florio essay; and that this essay should be reconsidered as a far more important literary source of The Tempest than heretofore acknowledged.

Philosophers in the New World: Montaigne and the Tradition of Epideictic Rhetoric

This article studies the essays of Michel de Montaigne in the context of the tradition of epideictic rhetoric from antiquity to the Renaissance, with particular attention to the humanist reception of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The focus of this attention is the relationship between epideictic and consensus, which proves to be more problematic than Aristotle seems to have anticipated. If we read Montaigne's essay “Des Cannibales” as a paradoxical encomium and compare it to Plutarch's declamation on the fortune of Alexander, we can see how epideictic works to undermine consensus and even to challenge the very impulse to conform to social and ethical norms.

The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays (review)

Reviewed by: The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays Kathleen Long Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, x + 227 pp. Quite simply put, The Fabulous Imagination is essential reading for any student or scholar of Montaigne's essays. Lawrence D. Kritzman analyzes the imagination, one of the intellectual faculties most theorized by early modern philosophers, as the hinge that both connects this seemingly distant period to our own and allows these periods to move together (and apart) in various revelatory ways. He consistently balances a profound understanding of Montaigne's essays with a broad and diverse knowledge of postmodern theory, in the process offering illuminating readings of these texts. The imagination both informs the constructions that Kritzman critiques—gender, sexuality, social identity, friendship, political hierarchies, cultural notions of death, family, illness, the law—and allows the subject to create his own narrative space relative to these, a space in which difference thrives. Kritzman begins with a meditation on the question of gender and Montaigne's critiques of the cultural construction of this category. This chapter offers cogent readings of the essays "On a Monstrous Child" ("D'un enfant monstrueux") and "On the Force of the Imagination" ("De la force de l'imagination"). Relative to the former, he demonstrates that the emphasis on the visual underscores the monster as an unclassifiable sign even as it reframes it as natural (rather than, as was often done in the early modern period, qualifying it as outside of the realm of nature). Similarly, a shepherd who cannot be classified as masculine because he lacks the appropriate sign (male genitals) nonetheless expresses a masculine sexuality, thus leading to a very different reading of masculine/ feminine difference seemingly contained within himself. In "On the Force of the Imagination," gender and sexuality seem largely driven by the imagination, and thus become unstable categories that shift with different circumstances and contexts. Given this instability, how can a fixed gender identity be established? Having already hinted at this connection in his first chapter, Kritzman extends this question to a broader epistemological realm in his second one. We engender monsters through "unbridled speculation" (Kritzman 54) and allow our reason to be dominated by the imagination, but not always in a liberating [End Page 258] way. We believe we know, in spite of the evidence of the instability of knowledge, and thus block the more pleasurable and creative aspects of the imagination in favor of a belief in the possibility of "absolute knowledge" (Kritzman 55). By questioning our understanding of gender identity, and of identity tout court, Montaigne counters our belief in the possibility of absolute, unchanging knowledge. In this context, Kritzman reads Montaigne's friendship with Étienne de la Boëtie as a relationship of constant revision and renegotiation (in the third chapter), and his understanding of death as a constant testing of hypotheses and a constant "working through" of something which cannot be represented in any adequate way (in the fourth chapter). As Kritzman's study progresses, it becomes apparent that the imagination not only misleads us, but diverts us from that which we cannot understand as well as that which we cannot withstand. The imagination becomes not only a way of working through, but of working around, and thus a survival strategy for harsh times. This valorization of difference, and of the imagination as the space of difference, allows Marie de Gournay to imagine herself as a writer—and thus to become one—because Montaigne has imagined her thus. Kritzman returns to the visual nature of difference, first evoked in the reading of the monstrous child, in his chapter on "On Physiognomy" ("De la phisionomie"): "For Montaigne, the appearance of a thing always already constitutes its otherness, since our perception constrains us and allows what is seen to be viewed equivocally" (Kritzman 137–37). Here, the process of reading liberates the self from an "imaginary superego" (Kritzman 153). The essay "multiplies physiognomies and therefore refuses to eradicate difference." As becomes clear in Kritzman's final chapter, "Of Experience" ("De l'experience"), this difference resides within the self as well as in external objects and in the interplay between...

Restraint and Rhetorical Craftiness: Emphasis as a Means of Figured Speech in Montaigne's Essays

One of the strongest voices against rhetorical excess in the Renaissance can be found in Montaigne's Essays. It is no wonder, then, that the author's own style has often been associated with a Stoic terseness that matches a professed goal of writing sans estude et artifice—in other words, without rhetoric. But when we consider the volatile political context in which Montaigne was writing, it becomes apparent that his stylistic restraint accomplishes far more than an effect of transparency. Focusing on the figure of emphasis-one in which the rhetor allows his audience to infer an additional meaning from what he says or does not say—this article explores the connection between the restraint of Montaigne's prose style and the classical art of covert argument.