And yet, with Montaigne there is never a question of restoring to its proper dignity something that Augustine belittles--as if Montaigne had set out to restore that "entire rational individualistic culture of classical antiquity: Plato and Aristotle, the Stoa and Epicurus," which "a burning lust has swept ... away, in one powerful assault" (69). If Augustine's subject is empty, oddly enough so to is Montaigne's. For Montaigne, the subject is not something which has existence, so much as a field of contradictions. It is not an inner voice but a play of voices, and then not a harmony so much as a heterophony (291-2), and a rhythm which freely skips from one thing to another (295), in the very contingency of their connection: the subject as a making-do, an improvisation.
| Montaigne pays a lot of attention to chance, and the encounter which Derrida, after Aristotle, calls tukhe (294-5, 298). He is aware of the gratuity of his project, and of the very privilege of his social existence which allows him to do this, in the sense of the non-necessity of the gift: the contingency of contexts (297, 299). This freedom without ground becomes for Montaigne the basis of a literary method he sees insistently as experimental (292), and as an ethical self-orientation which is profoundly un-tragic (310-11) and historically quite new and unprecedented; it comes about through those technologies and practices of the self which belong to and form the class of which Montaigne and the "educated person" he addresses are part. | Heterophonic, paying attention to the encounter, the contingent and the gift, treating its material as a laboratory for the experimental: all these describe Montaigne's writing project, and the subject as Montaigne comes to think it here. But they also describe quite precisely Auerbach's own project as it works itself out in Mimesis, as it tries to track out a history of representations of the human subject. Why should this be? Why should this point, the heterophonic subject of Montaigne, be the pivot between topic and representation, the edge of the mirror in which the two texts see each other reflected? |
