Table Of ContentEssaying Montaigne
STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 5
STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
Editor: Gerard Delanty, University of Liverpool
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Piet Strydom
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John O’Neill
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translated by Austin Harrington and Mary Shields
Essaying Montaigne:
A Study of the Renaissance Institution
of Writing and Reading
JOHN O’NEILL
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Second edition published 2001 by
LiverpoolUniversityPress
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
First edition published 1982 by
Routledge &Kegan Paul Ltd.
Copyright © John O’Neill 1982, 2001
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 0 85323 996 7 cased
ISBN 0 85323 507 4 paperback
Typeset by Northern Phototypesetting Co Ltd, Bolton
Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
Contents
Preface to the revised edition vii
To the Reader 1
1. Society and Self-study: the Problem of Literary Authority 13
2. Literary Anxiety and the Romance of Books 33
3. Rival Readings 51
4. Writing and Embodiment 69
5. Reading and Temperament 87
6. The Paradox of Communication: Reading the EssaysOtherwise 107
7. Portrait of the Essayist Without Qualities 127
8. On Public and Private Life 153
9. Civilisation, Literacy and Barbarism 177
10. On Living and Dying as We Do 201
Notes 223
Bibliography 245
Index 261
v
For my children
Brendan, Daniela, Gregory
Souvenir de Pully, Lausanne 1977–78
‘. . . essays in flesh and bone’
(III:5, 640)
Preface to the revised edition
It is quite in tune with Montaigne that one should revise one’s work in the light
of more thought and changes in historical fortune affecting publishing itself.
Twenty years ago, academic publishing began to experience those changes in
production formats, costing and marketing with which we are now more famil-
iar. Essaying Montaigne (1982) has survived its fate and happily is now ready to
take on a new lease of life in the spirit of Montaigne’s own perennial Essays. The
original impetus for my work was Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s beautiful essay,
‘Reading Montaigne’ (Signs, 1964). The subtlety of Merleau-Ponty’s exploration
of the ambiguous self in Montaigne and his larger phenomenology of embodied
thought provided me with an early and lasting model of the carnal practice of lit-
erature. It is one I have preferred to the rival practices of literary deconstruction
launched by Derrida whose Grammatology(1974) fixes upon Rousseau. The read-
er must choose between Montaigne and Rousseau, as I have done here and in
other works of mine on literary criticism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. I
have, of course, defended my preference for Montaigne’s practice of ‘essaying’
through elaborate commentary upon rival readings, which the Essays have
inspired for centuries with no sign of exhaustion in our own time. Indeed, the
classical status of the Essaysproves itself over and over in their contemporary rel-
evance. I have grounded the Essaysin the ethical relation of friendship as a rule
for personal, familial and political relationships. I have rejected the contempo-
rary psychoanalytical bias towards the absence and lack as the driving forces in
relationships unless a counterweight be given to presence and recognition in
social and political life. I believe that Montaigne discovered in the practice of the
essay form a technique of the self – that is both personal and civic. The reason I
pay such close attention to other critics of the Essays is that I am concerned to
vii
Preface to the revised edition
defend them against any reading that enslaves Montaigne’s own reading/writing
competence in the name of the current machinery of writing that runs on after
the death of the author.
viii
CHAPTER 1
To the Reader
Montaigne’s Essaysspeak to us in a voice so direct that the reader must consider
from the start how to accommodate their intimate appeal. The reader is no more
released from the world by the Essays than was their author in writing them.
The room in which the Essays were written, and wherever they are read, is
therefore not apart from the world; it becomes the setting of one of the world’s
great friendships to which we lend ourselves in a lesson of freedom, family
and good sense:
To the Reader
This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that
in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had
no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate
for such a purpose. I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my
relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon as they must),
they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament, and
by this means keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete
and alive.
If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself
better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in
my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is
myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my nat-
ural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. 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.
1
Essaying Montaigne
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable
to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
So farewell. Montaigne, this first day of March, fifteen hundred and eight.1
From the very beginning, Montaigne requires a reader who will not simply
lean upon the preface for an easy sense of the essays to follow. How is the reader
to intrude upon this domestic and private activity; how can he, without a family
acquaintance, trade upon the Essaysas a convenient access to Montaigne’s life? To
compensate for this lack of direction, however artfully, may not (as I intend to
show) save the reader from the rebuff of being clever by too far on behalf of so self-
ish and indulgent a writer as Montaigne set himself to be. The reader, after all, is
warned that the author’s purpose is nothing more serious than an easy nakedness
sported on some exotic isle. What has cost Montaigne so little is hardly to be
worked for in the sublimation of learned reading.
We cannot search for Montaigne in the Essaysin the same way that his family
and neighbours might have looked for the original. But, of course, not even his
family, any more than Montaigne’s neighbours, saw in him the man who was
writing the Essays:
In my region of Gascony they think it is a joke to see me in print. The farther
from my lair the knowledge of me spreads, the more I am valued. I buy print-
ers in Guienne, elsewhere they buy me. (III: 2, 614)
Montaigne’s consubstantiality with the Essays in no manner precedes his own
reading of them. We must disregard this aprioristic fiction upon the way an
author comes to terms with the gradual inscription or textualisation of his moods,
thoughts and temperament collecting in his own fiction or self-portrait.2 We
therefore cannot grasp Montaigne’s authorial self apart from the constant cross-
fertilisation between his reading and writing. Montaigne reads with his body. By
the same token, Montaigne’s reading and writing is an act of carnal inquiry, often
moody, lazy and dependent, but also witty, strong, humorous and gay. Montaigne
is therefore a religious writer in the only sense that is proper to him; or to the
word, namely, as a loving effort to keep body and soul together in family life. To
achieve this, Montaigne had to rework his beloved authors, to shift from his first
Latin tongue into his local Gascon; and always to communicate as though with a
friend or neighbour: ‘you and one companion are an adequate theater for each
other, or you for yourself. Let the people be one to you, and let one be a whole
people to you’ (I: 39, 182). It is from this perspective, too, that we can understand
Montaigne’s continuous conversation with his heroes from the past. He knew, of
course, that his own society provided no pedestal for them, and certainly not for
their imitators – at least not before their ‘replay’ in the French Revolution.3
2
