A Model Of Relational Individuality Montaigne

Seigneurie ctwl0121.tex V1 - 01/31/2019 8:57 P.M. Page 1
❦
❦ ❦
❦
14
A Model of Relational Individuality
Montaigne
George Hoffmann
University of Michigan, USA
Montaigne’s reputation as an urbane, mellow proponent of the art of living well has served
his sixteenth-century French Essays poorly over the centuries. Generations of readers have
found in the book’s complacent popular reception a license for flabby perspectivalism and
unreflective relativism: no matter whether right or wrong, Montaigne presents his way
of seeing things … What is missed in the reduction of his work to shallow idiosyn-
crasy is, first, the intensity of his engagement with others and their writing (McKinley
1981). Documented in the recent recovery of his personal copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature
of Things, this engagement has long been evident in concise but stunning insights to works
such as Plutarch’s On Socrates’ Daemon, Virgil’s Aeneid (Vergil’s Aeneid), or even contem-
porary books, such as Jean de Léry’s Voyage to Brazil, making Montaigne not only one of
his century’s most subtle readers but, also, most broadly informed. His interests stretched
from the Mediterranean to India, and Asia to America. In the context of his determined
refusal to privilege his own moment and place, the historical sweep and geographic scope
of his considerations suggest, if not an appreciation of literature as a global phenomenon,
at least the precocious consciousness of something resembling a world literature. Limited
neither to the cosmopolitan pretentions of Latin nor one country’s vernacular renaissance,
his wide-reaching reflections on imperialism, historical decadence, and cross-cultural com-
parison intimate writing’s ability to resonate across national boundaries. Quickly translated
into multiple languages, a dissemination the book seems to invite, Montaigne embraced
the notion that literature could exert a global reach.
A Companion to World Literature. Edited by Ken Seigneurie.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

❦
❦ ❦
❦
2 The Emergence of Modernity
The second dimension of the Essays that an over-easy celebration of individualism over-
looks lies in the focused way in which he turns his thinking in upon itself. Montaigne
never wanders far before folding the analysis at hand back onto himself and his viewpoint.
The precise opposite of unrestrained opinion-giving and self-privileging subjectivity, his
writing’s recursive movement forms the tightly compressed spring that lends the Essays its
uniquely supple, tensile quality. The non-linear nature of this procedure has unfortunately
suggested a lack of organization and rigor in his writing, when the exact reverse holds:
few writers have ever matched its self-discipline, its rejection of any Archimedean point
external to the discussion, its steadfast refusal to surrender to the urge to deliver advice to
others on the presumption of knowing more than they.
Beyond European Skepticism and Early Modern Political Reaction
Such self-checking proves more than merely the predictable upshot of Montaigne’s
much-discussed skepticism. Skepticism in its classical configuration proved a deeply
conservative philosophy that enjoined its practitioners to conform to majoritarian mores
and customs, not to indulge in minority views. In the sixteenth century, the most radical
school of classical skepticism, Pyrrhonism, did not operate for example as an argument for
confessional coexistence. Rather, it served as a partisan Counter-Reformation tool to under-
mine reformers’ claims (Popkin 1979; Legros 1999). To search in the sixteenth-century’s
rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus a prehistory for how Enlightenment thinkers questioned
the established political and religious order is to indulge in an anachronistic exercise
(Thorne 2009). Rather, Montaigne’s method of thought seems unprecedented for his
time and fits only imperfectly into skeptical schools, emphasizing inquisitiveness over
Pyrrhonism’s ataraxia, or tranquility, and engagement over epochē, or suspension of
judgment (Larmore 2004). Rather than unduly privilege skepticism, we might more
usefully consider self-regulation as the central preoccupation of Montaigne’s project and its
end to lie in disciplinary applications as much as epistemological ones (Bencivenga 1990).
Montaigne questions less how we know and more what we think we know about ourselves.
He aims not so much to unsettle knowledge as the knower, thereby encouraging subjects
to examine the conditions, premises, and habituation of their own response to the world.
Montaigne never simply exposes his thoughts; rather, he tests his thinking, subjecting
it to its own conclusions. Erasmus arguably wrote the century’s most famous precedent for
self-entailing discourse. But unlike how his figure of “Folly” uses self-reference to undercut
her affirmations and accentuate the work’s paradoxical status, Montaigne uses reflexivity
to tighten and discipline his thinking. If we miss this, we miss the greatness and the sin-
gularity that justify the enduring relevance of his work. Instead, the Essays become mere
historical witness, dusty canonical “masterpiece,” or self-congratulatory mirror for our-
selves, rather than the record of an extraordinary endurance for sustained self-consciousness.
In other words, instead of illustrating an independence of thought that surreptitiously
depends upon specific rank and privileges, Montaigne elaborates a self-generating auton-
omy that can truly travel to other social settings and cultural contexts. Related to Socrates’
precepts “know thyself” and “mind your business” (see Plato’s Symposium), which Mon-
ctwl0006
taigne sees as implicating each other (Montaigne 1958, Complete Works [henceforth CW] 9),

❦
❦ ❦
❦
A Model of Relational Individuality 3
turning one’s mind upon itself bears an intrinsically ethical function for Montaigne. The
ethos of such recursivity underwrites Montaigne’s identity: “I roll about in myself” (“moy je
me roulle en moy mesme,” or, literally, “me, I roll myself about within myself,” CW 499).
This proposition derives a “me,” “I,” and “myself,” or an acting self, an objective self, and
an objectified self all from Montaigne’s relation to himself. Recursive arguments will prove
an enduring strain in the French tradition, and more generally in continental thinking,
leading to the well-known successes (or excesses) of critical theory. Rarely, however, has
anyone managed them in a way more uncompromisingly straightforward.
Ever since Burckhardt historicized individuality by claiming its sudden appearance in
Italian city-states of the quattrocento, readers have associated the Renaissance with the
birth of the individual. A century before Hans Blumenberg, Burckhardt defended “the
legitimacy of the modern age” in asserting the Renaissance’s radical novelty; the assump-
tion he made proved both double and grand: first, that the European Renaissance consti-
tutes the first modern era, and second that a sense of individuality can serve as a measure for
the modern. Burckhardt’s image of an age itself “coming of age” implies a natural aptitude
for individuality in which humankind was destined to awaken from its former “childish
prepossession” (1990, 98), at odds with his desire to historicize the phenomenon.
Aspects of individuality that Burckhardt singled out – religious conscience, personal
grooming, the cult of fame, and differences in dress – bring his fourteenth-century condot-
tiere to the same table as that at which sat the twelfth-century knight, the Mughal emperor
or, one might add, the Roman man of letters, the Confucian scholar, and even the Homeric
hero. No matter that numbers of subsequent studies disputed Burckhardt’s dating as either
precocious or belated, or that many scholars today would be inclined to see some version
of the individual at work in all historical periods: the strength of Burckhardt’s associa-
tion endures. Of the many potential exemplars of his flawed thesis, Montaigne and Hamlet
unite the requisite textual effects of complexity and interiority with an institutional infras-
tructure that allow them to stand as easy paragons for the supposed “rise” of individuality.
One of the ironies of Burckhardt’s success, however, lies in the fact that these most
striking illustrations tend to discredit his very thesis as to the political origins of the
modern personality and its ultimate outcome in solipsism. Hamlet addressed his famous
soliloquies directly to the audience not as interior monologues, but as public tirades
and lessons; Montaigne similarly accesses a vibrant social setting of parlor debates,
gallant innuendo, and learned counsel. Neither Hamlet nor Montaigne clearly models
his self-image after Italian despotism, nor in response to neo-imperialism, nor, for that
matter, within processes of state formation.
The Social Palette of Individuality
Although not entirely without precedent, Montaigne’s innovative approach to using him-
self as the subject of writing came to him only gradually. Two of the signal notions he
employed, that of “painting” himself and the provisional, exploratory nature of “assay-
ing” (essayer) ideas first occurred regarding not his own writing, but that of his late friend,
Étienne de La Boétie, whom his book originally intended to memorialize (CW 135, 144,

❦
❦ ❦
❦
where essai is translated as “exercise”). Only later would Montaigne come to fall back upon
these analogies to talk about his own emerging project.
Moreover, Montaigne’s transferal of “painting” and “assaying” from his friend to himself
came inadvertently, in the course of exonerating himself of presumptuousness in response to
a preceding chapter’s denunciation of human vainglory. “These are the essays” of his judg-
ment, not conclusive results, he proclaims, before he compares “portray[ing] himself with
the pen” to how René of Sicily once drew a portrait of himself “with a pencil” (495–496).
Both functions he assigns to his work, that of testing and that of representing, mean to
show up his particular limitations as an individual – a self-circumscription that invites
readers to apply their own judgment to the topics at hand. Here, one can see how signature
devices now associated with Montaigne’s “individuality” originated in a recursive move-
ment whereby he subjected himself to his own critiques rather than in an easy celebration
of his eccentricity. The reader in consequence is incited less to admire than to critically
assess the author.
The individuality Montaigne explored thus lies at some distance from the sentimen-
tal subjectivity of romanticism or the tokenism of today’s consumer society. Individuality
is neither felt nor acquired for Montaigne, it is wrought through scrutinizing oneself
critically. One of the defining traits of modern “individuality” appears in how it lays claim
to a unique character for each person, an idea arguably first championed by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (see Rousseau and the Firmament of Modern Literature) toward the end of the
ctwl0125
eighteenth century: “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met, I will even venture to say
that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different”
(1953, 17). Sensitive to the minute shades in preference and habit that distinguish people,
Montaigne did not fear to claim, “I have seen no more evident a monster or miracle in the
world than myself” (CW 787). Yet, elsewhere, he specifies “What we call monsters [ … ]
likely resemble others of the same genre,” a genre that is simply “unknown to mankind”:
“it seems unlikely that God would make a single work without a companion and that the
matter of this form would be exhausted in this single individual” (CW 713, 524).
Montaigne falls shy of Rousseau’s sense of himself, for the uniqueness he perceives never
proves to be a property he possesses, let alone a default quality inherent in all humans.
Rather, it arises as a function, first, of his singular friendship with La Boétie, a fellow
magistrate in Bordeaux’s Parlement, which “has no other model than itself, and can be
compared only with itself ” (CW 139). This appears to be the language of modern indi-
viduality, but applied to a relationship between two people – a relationship, moreover, in
which each partner risked “losing” his individual identity in the other, “I say lose,” insisted
Montaigne, “for neither of us reserved anything for himself, nor was anything either his or
mine” (CW 139). Further, Montaigne saw his “other half” in this affective symbiosis not
as unique, either, but rather as an exemplar of classical models: “His mind was molded in
the pattern of other ages” (CW 144).
Individuality arises, second, as a function of Montaigne’s relationship with the Essays,
“the only book in the world of its kind” (CW 278). He will describe his writing as
“grotesques” (CW 135), as “monstrous” (CW 135) or filled with the “monsters” of his
imagination (CW 21), and reflecting his own “deformity” (CW 787). He frequently
points to his work’s étrangeté meaning both “strange” and “alien” (CW 21, 135, 278).
At times, he associates the singular nature of his enterprise with mental disturbance, as

❦
❦ ❦
❦
“eccentric” or “fantastic” (CW 278), “roving,” “roaming,” or “wandering” (CW 504, 761,
273), composed of “reveries” (CW 106, 504), fantaisies or rêveries translated as “fancies”
(CW 21, 107, 251, 296, 297, 504, 611), fantaisies translated as “notions” (CW 229, 234),
“thoughts” (CW 721), or “ideas” (CW 135), rêverie translated as “daydream” (CW 274,
278), ravasserie as “ramblings” (CW 734), but also “folly” (CW 273, 495), even “madness”
(CW 21, 761). Despite the edulcorating English version, all these terms in French lay
closer to the final option: rather than promote idiosyncrasy for its own sake, Montaigne
considers the peculiarity of his work akin to a form of insanity.
Unlike today’s individuality, Montaigne’s proves intrinsically relational, however
idiopathic. His is an idiosyncrasy built not of essence but of interactions, one whose
peculiarities transpire in the ways he responds to others and comes to understand those
relationships – or what he called commerces: exchanges, forms of association, or even rela-
tionships which applied indifferently to persons or books (CW 621). This manifests itself
even in the architecture of his work, where his choice to dedicate the longest essays in his
first edition to women genders his reader as female (see Gender and Representation). In one,
ctwl0084
Montaigne himself calls attention to the link between literary creation and procreation,
suggesting a reproductive process in which the book’s meaning gestates in the reader’s
mind (Larkin 1982). Throughout, he associates his writing with propagative imagery (CW
20, 145, 293, 595, 818). His attention to the readers’ part in creating his book’s signifi-
cance lies at the heart of the impression the work gives of affording its audience a peculiarly
intimate relationship with its writer, one in which the reader becomes more of a friend than
pupil, colleague, or scholar – even as that audience extends vertiginously beyond specific
professional and literary milieus to anticipate a transhistorical and transnational public.
Throughout, he stubbornly refuses to regard the wider reading public as did most of his
contemporaries: impressionable, undiscerning, and, in a word, gullible. From the first line
of the preface, he instead makes clear he must earn his reader’s trust. Such efforts can come in
the form of protestation, “This book was written in good faith, reader,” or denegation “you
would be unreasonable to spend you leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject. So farewell”
(CW 2). Often, he returns to the claim his book addresses only family and friends, thereby
inviting the reader to adopt the role of an intimate friend (see Intimate Life and Roman-
ctwl0177
ticism). Even more often, he criticizes himself in order to deny any ulterior motive to seek
glory, particularly in “Of presumption,” a chapter generally regarded as pivotal in his deci-
sion to organize his writing around the idea of a self-portrait. In one particularly audacious
bid to earn the reader’s trust, he even reveals he is less genitally well endowed than he could
have wished (CW 677). Most pointedly, he abandons protestations of sincerity altogether in
“Giving the lie” when he refuses to defend his truthfulness, “whom shall we believe when
he talks about himself, in so corrupt an age, seeing that there are few or none whom we
can believe when they speak of others, where there is less incentive for lying?” (CW 505).
The Satiric Basis of the Essays
Given the intersubjective nature of Montaigne’s individuality, it should come as no sur-
prise that its underlying models are lifted from Roman satire, a mixed genre devoted
to truth-telling that portrayed social life as it was rather than as it should be. Horace

❦
❦ ❦
❦
(see We are the World) proves the most quoted author in the Essays, and his satires’ per-
ctwl0041
sonal blend of stoic indifference and epicurean urbanity, often chattily addressed to friends
or patrons, lies close to Montaigne’s tone (Girot 2005) (see We are the World). Juvenal
ctwl0041
supplies indignation and colorful imagery (Boudou 2005). Finally, Persius not only under-
scores the emptiness and inanity of life, an idea that appears frequently in Montaigne until
the topic earns its own essay, one of the longest and most accomplished in the work, “Of
vanity.” But, also, Persius furnishes a powerful model of self-exhibition toward moral ends:
“I offer my insides for scrutiny” (5.22), compared to Montaigne’s aim to “penetrate the
opaque depths of [the mind’s] innermost folds” (CW 273), “who search myself to my very
entrails” (CW 644), and “expose[s] myself entire: my portrait is a cadaver on which the
veins, the muscles, and the tendons appear at a glance” (CW 274) (Legros 2005). Whether
mild or mordant, classical satire displays a subjectivity that always proves relational: the
satiric “I” does not arise prior to others, but, instead, emerges at the intersections and
conflicts between various proponents in one’s society. This approach to selfhood as a trans-
action that requires one to “read” others, and oneself as another, positions Montaigne’s work
advantageously to speak to contemporary concerns of openness and sensitivity to difference.
The task of self-exhibition can, on occasion, present itself as a form of disrobing: “Had I
been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s
first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly
naked” (CW 2). A few pages later, however, Montaigne confesses his reluctance to take his
clothes off in front of servants or doctors, “I who am so bold-mouthed, am nevertheless
by nature affected by this shame” (CW 11), a personal bent that he endorses in a more
philosophical tone when, in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” he derides humankind’s
pathetic physical carriage compared to that of animals, “I think we had more reason than
any other animal to cover ourselves. We can be excused for [...] adorn[ing] ourselves with
their beauty” (CW 356). If nudity serves as a figurative ideal for transparency, it hardly
proves cause for celebration. Rather, dropping one’s social “mask” requires effort, and he
acknowledges the difficulty of self-revelation, “We cannot distinguish the skin from the
shirt” (CW 773). Ultimately, he will resign himself to admitting that the Essays do not
so much expose as cover up, describing his portrait as a process of “constantly adorning
myself” (CW 273). Montaigne does not, then, discover the individual as a given, instead
he considers the self as a fully constructed social creation.
Readers have long remarked how the specter of death hovers at Montaigne’s elbow.
Although he began writing several years before the onset of the illness that would claim
his life, his condition announced itself as incurable well before he was finished with the
first edition. Montaigne seems eager to frame his writing as his last act (CW 2, 21, 279,
297, 486, 503, 595, 857), and his impending departure leads to the curious intention to
“portray myself to the life” (CW 278). This was a phrase the time associated with por-
traits, commonly mistranslated today as “portrayed from life,” whereas Montaigne makes
clear the portrait means to bring “to” life memories of him after death. He is referring
to a longstanding tradition in which portraits invoked a Christian model of resurrection,
an understanding of portrayal all but lost today (Hoffmann 2000) and one which did not
always seem to fulfill its promise even in Montaigne’s eyes, as when he disparages his book
as a “dead and mute portrait” (CW 596).

❦
❦ ❦
❦
Missing, as well, from Montaigne’s sense of himself was one of modern individuality’s
constitutive preconditions: a developed sense of “private” space. Not only did early modern
homes serve as one’s place of business (Montaigne’s country “chateau” employed dozens of
servants and laborers), but Montaigne received many guests in these quarters and worked
alongside several secretaries. His lone tower library of modern imagining proves less a room
of one’s own than the typical surveillance office that heads of household used to oversee their
estates (elevated and affording views into the courtyards and stables as well as the fields
beyond the château’s walls). Thus it stands not merely as a “retreat” from the world but
a central post integral to the complex managerial duties Montaigne faced when at home
(Hoffmann 1998).
Of course Montaigne, like many of his peers, accessed a longstanding Roman tradition
of the “rustic retreat” most visible in his insistence on the “idleness” of his writing (CW 2,
274, 487, 504, 574) (see The Imperial Poetics of Ancient Bucolic). Such references frame
ctwl0022
his musings as the pastime of a gentleman’s leisure, entertained for no end other than
themselves (Krause 2003). Yet, in another vein, he evokes writing as a “register” meant to
shame such idleness (CW 504, 721, 734), a disciplinary image that will prove crucial to
his evolving method of self-assaying (CW 21, mettre en rolle translated as “put in writing”;
273, contrerolle translated as “examine”; 499, contreroller translated as “taking stock of”; 504,
enroller translated as “record”; 611, contrerolle translated as “record”). He will suggest, then,
that his portrait, the “picture of my qualities” fulfills a self-regulatory purpose and that it
“serves me as a rule” (CW 749).
A Natural History of the Human
This rigorous self-investigation takes place within a larger, naturalist study of what it means
to be human, as when Montaigne refers to “the study I am making, the subject of which is
man” (CW 481) and when he proposes the book as a test of his own “natural faculties” (CW
107, 296). One can discern behind such claims the ambition to write a natural history
of humankind. Why would the idiosyncratic study of one singular person apply to the
species as a whole? Montaigne addresses this question in terms of his middling social station
when he asserts, “Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate [l’humaine condition]” (CW
611). Often read as claiming a universal human nature discernable through each individual,
this famous line means something far more modest. Condition designated social status at
the time, captured in the translation’s “estate.” Thus the sentence expresses something
more like the notion that each person faces similar philosophical challenges regardless of
their social rank (Tournon 1990). In other words, “Every degree of fortune has in it some
semblance of the princely” (CW 194) or, even more clearly, “The life of Caesar has no more
to show us than our own; an emperor’s or an ordinary man’s, it is still a life subject to all
human accidents” (CW 822).
However “scientific” Montaigne’s impulse to study humankind through himself, this
exploration unfolds in a highly literary format. For, alongside Montaigne’s self-reflexive
logic and tight-grained empirical observations runs a deeply poetic sensibility whereby
certain images resonate throughout an extended series of reflections, such as the variations
on “emptiness” in “Of Vanity,” or the image of a labyrinth and the idea that poetry can

❦
❦ ❦
❦
“tickle” (chatouiller) in “Of Some Verses of Virgil” (McKinley 1995). His most successful
chapters achieve an artful intertwining of both poetic and logical registers.
Irredeemably dull depictions of humanism have blinded readers to how thoroughly
perverse it proved as an educational undertaking. Christian pupils learned pagan myths,
infants recited tales of experience written by old men, sedentary youth steeped themselves
in legendary battles, French children endeavored to assimilate the culture of a foreign,
conquering power a millennium and a half old, and masters attempted to teach boys to
behave by having them act out the amorous escapades of classical comedy. As the product
of such endeavors, Montaigne illustrates the strange potential that inventive minds could
find in the classical tradition. Perhaps, as well, he reminds us how, before it ossified into a
marker of European class status, the classical world itself covered an intercontinental scope
teeming with travelers, translators, and traders who by both profession and inclination
transgressed boundaries.
From National Pantheon to International Critical Public
More than any other author before him, even Erasmus, Montaigne solicits a mode of
reading that engages the reader’s creative agency. That agency has flourished in some
places and times more fully than others, and its nature has changed from one setting to
the other. In the sixteenth century, readers responded most enthusiastically to the book’s
freewheeling response to the classical tradition and implicit invitation to “play” with a
shared Latin education, transporting Greco-Roman literature from the scholar’s dusty
study to the urbane conversation of nascent salons where a dash of noble nonchalance
made learning recreational. Awash in high-literary fluency, the Essays nowhere sought to
exploit as a credential the time and labor demanded to attain such proficiency. Instead,
Virgil, Horace, and Seneca are made to seem immediately accessible to a reader with even
passing familiarity of Latin thanks to a French context that explicates, often paraphrases,
or even translates the passages in question.
In the eighteenth century, the Essays became a bedside guide dispensing moral advice
on how to live well, following the seventeenth-century consolidation of Montaigne’s rep-
utation as a sage who had found the formula for living peacefully in troubled times. Seen
now as a philosopher rather than a humanist, he served as a guide or, even, exemplar for
prudent, wise conduct. But by the nineteenth century, the autobiographical potential of
the Essays began to strike readers as a precursor to their own exaggerated sense of subjec-
tive individuality. It was this Romantic reception that ultimately pushed Burckhardt to
redefine the entire period of the Renaissance as the dawn of self-conscious individuality.
By the twentieth century, the book became enshrined not only as the prototype of how to
“be oneself” but, also, as a canonical precedent for modern liberal thinking (Millet 1995;
Boutcher 2017) (see Literature and Liberalism).
ctwl0277
These overeager appropriations in fact provincialize Montaigne and risk making
him seem a compromised paragon of European “high” culture and dubious canonicity.
Returning Montaigne to his moment and place paradoxically opens the fuller potential of
his book to address audiences far removed from elitist settings that Montaigne would have
been quick to disavow. From the first, the book proved a grab-bag in which Montaigne

❦
❦ ❦
❦
collected the fruits of a number of distinct projects. It contains ambassadorial briefs
destined to serve as recommendation for employment, a defense of Raymond Sebond
which served to distance Montaigne from his translation of the author’s censored claims, a
testament to his dead friend, tirades against doctors following ill health, moral discourses
from the periphery of the Palace Academy’s lectures, notes from a lifetime of reading,
and opinions born in conversation and intended to spark new conversation in turn. In
the face of this miscellany of purposes, traditional responses to Montaigne’s hallowed
accomplishments persist to varying degrees, alongside a contemporary critical climate
which tends to greet Montaigne’s self-portrayal with ever greater suspicion and to leverage
historical context not so much to celebrate the Essays’ author as to question his goals
and motives (Desan 2014; Hoffmann 2015). The record suggests that Montaigne will
survive this phase, as well, and that his book will continue to reinvent itself among new
generations of readers through how it provokes critical modes of self-regulated thought
conspicuously free from institutional settings.
The very multiplicity of the Essays’ purposes and the variety of responses they have
solicited put Montaigne’s model of self-writing in a particularly advantageous light from
the perspective of world literature. His relational individuality, labile and other-oriented,
sensitive to historical conflict yet defiant in its claim to judge freely (Boutcher 2017),
offers a vision of self that avoids solipsism and an autonomy that avoids historical naiveté.
From the flat observations of early chapters to the powerful chords of its late prose, his
was a book that pushed the envelope of his contemporaries’ understanding of decorum in
self-presentation, offering an extended reflection on the relationship between informal style
and personal substance, between self-exploration and political engagement (see ctwl0212).
ctwl0212
Those issues hardly risk disappearing soon.1
NOTE
1 I thank Abi Celis for her insights and astute
comments that helped reshape this chapter.
REFERENCES
Bencivenga, Ermanno. 1990. The Discipline of Sub-
jectivity: An Essay on Montaigne. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Boudou, Bénedicte. 2005. “La présence de Juvé-
nal dans les Essais.” Montaigne Studies, 17: 1–2:
119–133.
Boutcher, Warren. 2017. The School of Montaigne. 2
vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burckhardt, Jacob. 1990. The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy, translated by S.G.C. Middle-
more. New York: Penguin.
Desan, Philippe. 2014. Montaigne: une biographie
politique. Paris: O. Jacob. Published in English as
Montaigne: A Life, translated by Steven Rendall
and Lisa Neal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2017.
Girot, Jean-Eudes. 2005. “Remarques sur Horace
dans les Essais.” Montaigne Studies, 17 (1–2):
53–61.
Hoffmann, George. 1998. Montaigne’s Career.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hoffmann, George. 2000. “Portrayal from Life, or
to Life? The Essays’s Living Effigy.” French Forum
25 (2): 145–163.
Hoffmann, George. 2015. “Was Montaigne a Good
Friend?” In Men and Women Making Friends

❦
❦ ❦
❦
in Early Modern France, edited by Lewis C.
Seifert and Rebecca Wilkin, 31–60. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Krause, Virginia. 2003. Idle Pursuits: Literature
and Oisiveté in the French Renaissance. Newark:
University of Delaware Press; London: Associ-
ated University Presses.
Larkin, Neil M. 1982. “The Essais’ Dedications.”
Romanic Review, 73 (4): 401–410.
Larmore, Charles. 2004. “Un scepticisme sans tran-
quillité: Montaigne et ses modèles antiques.”
In Montaigne: scepticisme, métaphysique, théologie,
edited by Vincent Carraud and Jean-Luc Marion,
15–31. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Legros, Alain. 1999. “La dédicace de l’Adversus
mathematicos au cardinal de Lorraine, ou du bon
usage de Sextus Empiricus selon Gentien Hervet
et Montaigne.” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de
Montaigne, 8th sér., 15–16: 51–72.
Legros, Alain. 2005. “De Perse à Montaigne: dire
la vérité, exposer l’intime.” Montaigne Studies, 17
(1–2): 63–80.
McKinley, Mary. 1981. Words in a Corner: Studies
in Montaigne’s Latin Quotations. Lexington, KY:
French Forum Publishers.
McKinley, Mary. 1995. Les Terrains vagues des
“Essais”: Itinéraires et intertextes. Etudes montaig-
nistes, 25. Paris: Champion.
Millet, Oliver. 1995. La Première Réception des
“Essais” de Montaigne (1580–1640). Paris:
Champion.
Montaigne, Michel de. 1958. Essays, translated by
Donald Frame. In The Complete Works of Mon-
taigne. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Popkin, Richard H. 1979. The History of Skepticism
from Erasmus to Spinoza, rev. edn. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1953. The Confessions,
translated by J.M. Cohen. New York: Penguin.
Thorne, Christian. 2009. The Dialectic of
Counter-Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Tournon, André. 1990. “Le grammairien, le
jurisconsulte et ‘l’humaine condition.’” Bulletin
de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, 7th
ser., 21–22:
107–118.
FURTHER READING
Bakewell, Sarah. 2010. How to Live, Or a Life of Mon-
taigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an
Answer. London: Chatto & Windus.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age, translated by Robert M. Wallace.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cave, Terence. 2007. How to Read Montaigne. Lon-
don: Granta.
Desan, Philippe, ed. 2007. Dictionnaire Montaigne,
2nd edn. Paris: Champion.
Desan, Philippe, ed. 2016. The Oxford Handbook of
Montaigne. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Green, Felicity. 2012. Montaigne and the Life of Free-
dom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Langer, Ullrich, ed. 2005. The Cambridge Companion
to Montaigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Levine, Alan. 2001. Sensual Philosophy: Toleration,
Skepticism, and Montaigne’s Politics of the Self . Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington Books.
Montaigne, Michel de. 1922–1923. Les Essais de
Michel de Montaigne, 1st edn, edited by Pierre
Villey. Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan. Second edi-
tion, 1965, edited by V[erdun]-L[ouis] Saulnier
[and Robert Aulotte]. Paris: Presses universi-
taires de France.
Paige, Nicholas D. 2001. Being Interior: Autobi-
ography and the Contradictions of Modernity in
Seventeenth-Century France, 21–63. Philadelphia:
University of Philadelphia Press.
Strier, Richard. 2007. “Self-Revelation and
Self-Satisfaction in Montaigne and Descartes.”
Prose Studies, 29 (3): 405–426.
Wilden, Anthony. 1968. “‘Par divers moyens on
arrive a pareille fin’: A Reading of Montaigne.”
Modern Language Notes, 83: 577–597.

❦
❦ ❦
❦
The abstract and keywords will not be included in the PDF or any printed version of
your article, but are necessary for publication on Wiley’s online publishing platform
to increase the discoverability of your article.
If the abstract and keywords are not present below, please take this opportunity to
add them now.
The abstract should be a short paragraph up to 200 words in length and keywords
between 5 to 10 words.
Abstract: Montaigne does not confirm Burckhardt’s thesis regarding the rise of the individual in
the Renaissance. Instead he leads one to question whether early modern subjectivities correspond to mod-
ern senses of selfhood. His recursive, self-regulative, and relational practices of individuality provide a
more open-ended and outward-facing model, one suited to today’s demand for balancing claims to auton-
omy with awareness of historical context. Essentially satiric in genre, Montaigne’s self-writing deploys
a spectrum of images and analogies. He explains his project as portraiture, self-testing, a quest for sin-
cerity, self-exhibition, memorial reanimation, self-discipline, mental procreation, and a natural history of
humankind.
Keywords: Jacob Burckhardt; critical agency; humanism; recursivity; relational individuality; satire;
self-exhibition; self-regulation; sincerity; social subjectivity

A Model Of Relational Individuality Montaigne

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to A Model Of Relational Individuality Montaigne

Similar to A Model Of Relational Individuality Montaigne (6)

More from Amanda Moore

More from Amanda Moore (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

A Model Of Relational Individuality Montaigne