Montaigne After Theory Theory After Montaigne

Essayist Michel de Montaigne is one of the most accessible and widely read authors in world literature. His skepticism and relativism, and the personal quality of his writing, make him a perennial favorite among readers today. Montaigne After Theory / Theory After Montaigne pursues the idea that theory has altered the scholarly understanding of Montaigne, while Montaigne's ideas have simultaneously challenged the authority of the various interpretive doxa collectively known as "theory." Montaigne's life and writings have drawn myriad interpretations. While some scholars of his work focus on the content of the writings to define the man, others stress his playful use of language. Montaigne's complex and multifaceted works provide fertile ground for exploring themes of wide-ranging significance within the field of literary theory, including the relationship between biography and theory; the critique of modernism; a critical history of the confessional mode of writing; sexuality and gender; and the theory of practice. The essays in this collection move beyond the current stalemate in Montaigne criticism by revisiting questions about the role of theory in literary studies and by opening up a dialogue on the validity and limitations, or use and abuse, of theory in Montaigne studies.

"This is one of the few books on Montaigne that fuses analytical skill with humane awareness of why Montaigne matters." Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University "In this exhilarating and learned book on Montaigne's essays, Lawrence D. Kritzman contemporizes the great writer. Reading him from today's deconstructive America, Kritzman discovers Montaigne always already deep into a dialogue with Jacques Derrida and psychoanalysis. One cannot but admire this fabulous act of translation." Hélène Cixous "Throughout his career, Lawrence D. Kritzman has demonstrated an intimate knowledge of Montaigne's essays and an engagement with French philosophy and critical theory. The Fabulous Imagination sheds precious new light on one of the founders of modern individualism and on his crucial quest for self-knowledge." Jean Starobinski, professor emeritus of French literature, University of Geneva Michel de Montaigne's (1533-1592) Essais was a profound study of human subjectivity. More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Montaigne embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. Through the questions How shall I live? How can I know myself? he explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumatic memories; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the act of anticipating and coping with death. In this book, Lawrence D. Kritzman traces Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self. For Montaigne, imagination lies at the core of an internal universe that influences both the body and the mind. Imagination is essential to human experience. Although Montaigne recognized that the imagination can confuse the individual, "the fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship. Kritzman begins with Montaigne's study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death. Kritzman concludes with Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion. His reading demonstrates that the mind's I, as Montaigne envisioned it, sees by imagining that which is not visible, thus offering an alternative to the logical positivism of our age.

Montaigne called it a ramble; Chesterton the joke of literature; and Hume an ambassador between the worlds of learning and of conversation. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and contradictions across its history, from Montaigne's 1580 Essais through the familiar intimacies of the Romantic essay, and up to more recent essayists such as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine? Sometimes called the fourth genre, the essay has been over-shadowed in literary history by fiction, poetry, and drama, and has proved notoriously resistant to definition. On Essays reveals in the essay a pattern of paradox: at once a pedagogical tool and a refusal of the methodical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic. Perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little work on the tradition of the essay. Neither a comprehensive history nor a student companion, On Essays is a series of seventeen elegantly written essays on authors and aspects in the history of the genre — essays which, taken together, form the most substantial book yet published on the essay in Britain and America.

In 1580, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) published a book unique by its title and its content: Essays"R. A literary genre was born. At first sight, the Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections, but they engage with questions that animate the human mind, and tend toward a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death. For this reason, Montaigne's thought and writings have been a subject of enduring interest across disciplines. This Handbook brings together essays by prominent scholars that examine Montaigne's literary, philosophical, and political contributions, and assess his legacy and relevance today in a global perspective. The chapters of this Handbook offer a sweeping study of Montaigne across different disciplines and in a global perspective. One section covers the historical Montaigne, situating his thought in his own time and space, notably the Wars of Religion in France. The political, historical and religious context of Montaigne's Essays requires a rigorous presentation to inform the modern reader of the issues and problems that confronted Montaigne and his contemporaries in his own time. In addition to this contextual approach to Montaigne, the Handbook also establishes a connection between Montaigne's writings and issues and problems directly relevant to our modern times, that is to say, our age of global ideology. Montaigne's considerations, or essays, offer a point of departure for the modern reader's own assessments. The Essays analyze what can be broadly defined as human nature, the endless process by which the individual tries to impose opinions upon others through the production of laws, policies or philosophies. Montaigne's motto -- "What do I know?" -- is a simple question yet one of perennial significance. One could argue that reading Montaigne today teaches us that the angle defines the world we see, or, as Montaigne wrote: "What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it."

What is the legacy of Theory after the deaths of so many of its leading lights, from Jacques Derrida to Roland Barthes? Bringing together reflections by leading contemporary scholars, Dead Theory explores the afterlives of the work of the great theorists and the current state of Theory today. Considering the work of thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas, the book explores the ways in which Theory has long been haunted by death and how it might endure for the future.

Winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honorable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Monatigne, perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them “essays,” meaning “attempts” or “tries.” Into them, he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog’s ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller and, over four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment—and in search of themselves. This book, a spirited and singular biography, relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing, youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Étienne de La Boétie and with his adopted “daughter,” Marie de Gournay. And we also meet his readers—who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, “how to live?”

Montaigne's Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections, but they engage with questions that animate the human mind, and tend to a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death. For this reason, Montaigne's thought and writings have been a subject of enduring interest across disciplines. This Handbook brings together essays by prominent scholars that examine Montaigne's literary, philosophical, and political contributions, and assess his legacy and relevance today in a global perspective. It presents Montaigne's Essays not only in their historical context but also as a starting point for discussing issues that concern us today.

The Unbridled Tongue looks at gossip, rumour, and talking too much in Renaissance France in order to uncover what was specific about these practices in the period. Taking its cue from Erasmus's Lingua, in which both the subjective and political consequences of an idle and unbridled tongue are emphasised, the book investigates the impact of gossip and rumour on contemporary conceptions of identity and political engagement. Emily Butterworth discusses prescriptive literature on the tongue and theological discussions of Pentecost and prophecy, and then covers nearly a century in chapters focused on a single text: Rabelais's Tiers Livre, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, Ronsard's Discours des misères de ce temps, Montaigne's 'Des boyteux', Brantôme's Dames galantes and the anonymous Caquets de l'accouchée. In covering the 'long sixteenth century', the book is able to investigate the impact of the French Wars of Religion on perceptions of gossip and rumour, and place them in the context of an emerging public sphere of political critique and discussion, principally through the figure of the 'public voice' which, although it was associated with unruly utterance, was nevertheless a powerful rhetorical tool for the expression of grievances. The Cynic virtue of parrhesia, or free speech, is similarly ambivalent in many accounts, oscillating between bold truth-telling (liberté) and disordered babble (licence). Drawing on modern and pre-modern theories of the uses and function of gossip, the book argues that, despite this ambivalence in descriptions of the tongue, gossip and idle talk were finally excluded from the public sphere by being associated with the feminine and the irrational.

What is at the heart of political resistance? Whilst traditional accounts often conceptualise it as a reaction to power, this volume (prioritising remarks by Michel Foucault) invites us to think of resistance as primary. The author proposes a strategic analysis that highlights how our efforts need to be redirected towards a horizon of creation and change. Checchi first establishes a genealogy of two main trajectories of the history of our present: the liberal subject of rights and the neoliberal ideas of human capital and bio-financialisation. The former emerges as a reactive closure of Etienne de la Boétie's discourse on human nature and natural companionship. The other forecloses the creative potential of Autonomist Marxist conceptions of labour, first elaborated by Mario Tronti. The focus of this text then shifts towards contemporary openings. Initially, Checchi proposes an inverted reading of Jacques Rancière's concept of politics as interruption that resonates with Antonio Negri's emphasis on Baruch Spinoza's potential qua resistance. Finally, the author stages a virtual encounter between Gilles Deleuze's ontology of matter and Foucault's account of the primacy of resistance with which the text begins. Through this series of explorations, The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming traces a conceptual trajectory with and beyond Foucault by affirming the affinity between resistance and creation.

This title explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance. Eden draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca to show how the classical genre of the 'familiar' letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch Erasmus, and Montaigne.