| In this study, I demonstrate how Montaigne's perplexing question of identity is inseparable from the question of the other. Chapter 1 deals with Montaigne's writing of Socrates, the ideal other of Renaissance humanism. Taking as a point of departure his paradoxical figuration of Socrates in "De la phisionomie," I examine how Montaigne appropriates and alters the Socratic imperative, "Take care of yourself," evoked by the essayist in the context of the Wars of Religion. Central to the Montaignian model of self-care is the author's concern for both the soul and body, which leads him to consider an alternative view of philosophy to the authoritative one articulated in Plato's Phaedo. While explicitly dismissing the exclusive cultivation of the soul, as well as anthropocentric accounts of the afterlife, Montaigne's writing points to a radically new understanding of personal immortality. Yet such a concern for immortality is by no means restricted to the self, to the author's aesthetic self-fashioning. Rather, it extends to the fashioning of the other, to a project of immortalization that, however, neither obliterates the alterity of Socrates, nor fully circumscribes the identity of this ideal other. Addressing the similar problematic of negotiating the space of alterity within a Renaissance rhetoric of exemplarity, Chapter 2 moves to a consideration of the intimate other, namely, Montaigne's Etienne de La Boetie. Whereas Socrates comes to Montaigne already exemplary, La Boetie has to be made exemplary---such is the project of "De l'amitie," a project of preservation that was arguably the genesis of Montaigne's literary identity and career. Yet in this essay, Montaigne raises the difficulty in translating one's lived experience of friendship into the universal language of humanism. While the first two chapters treat Montaigne's essaying of relationships predicated above all on sameness and proximity, Chapter 3 takes as its subject the cannibal of the New World, the figure of radical alterity par excellence. In his project of rehabilitation, Montaigne confronts the problem of how to reduce the moral and geographical distance separating his contemporaries and the inhabitants of the New World, without simultaneously domesticating the cultural specificity of the Amerindian. |
