"parler seulement de moy": The Disposition of the Subject in Montaigne's Essay "De l'art de conferer"

car c'est moy que je peins declares Montaigne in his note to the reader, ¹ with which The Essays begin as early as in their princeps edition of 1580. The "picture" Montaigne "paints" of himself, of the person behind the writing, of his experiences, of his ideas which do not suffer the constraint of any philosophical system, and of his body which correspondingly follows its desires accepting little limitation, has been the principal reason for the Essays' popularity. Readers have been fascinated with this self "depicted" on the pages of the Essays, in constant change, slowed down only by habit ² , but never ceasing to persuade us about the richness and diversity of its experience. They have enjoyed the dynamic image traced by the fluid medium of writing and have taken Montaigne's word for it: "Je ne peins pas l'estre. Je peins le passage" (601-2c and 805b).Yet to read Montaigne's book--with Montaigne--as a painting-in-words is to understand writing as a medium modeled on phenomenological consciousness which can only grasp its object in its momentary "this-ness" and is forced to change every moment as its object does. This is the anaphoric model of representation that Montaigne's metaphor of painting offers us: writing is inevitably a split second behind its object, its subject-matter, and in every moment in which it captures the extra-linguistic thing which it refers to it is already false: writing constantly runs the risk of becoming "poisant" and "endormy" (146a), of lagging behind the experience which it represents.

Auerbach, one of the most sophisticated of Montaigne's "realist" readers, gives a particular twist to Montaigne's model of self-representation: he compares Montaigne's texts to modern "snapshots," which, although they capture only segments of an experience, succeed indirectly in making it appear to us in its entirety. ³ His metaphor, drawn from photography, nuances Montaigne's own metaphor of writing as a kind of painting: it suggests that the text of The Essays does not refer to something previous but "shows" (in a series of instants) that which is directly inaccessible, the experience which has perhaps never yet been defined or named because only language can "show" it. More recently, Antoine Compagnon has explored the "ontology of the instant" operative in the essays as the pendant of a nominalist theory of language expressing, couched in purely linguistic terms, what Auerbach once called a "snapshot." ⁴ Both these interpretations suggest that taking Montaigne's metaphor of painting literally and thinking that his writing is directly modeled on pictorial representation can mean falling into a trap, one carefully constructed by Montaigne as well as by numerous Renaissance writers who claim that writing emulates pictoral mimesis. ⁵ The trick is that as an effect of such "emulation" writing always finishes by getting the better of pictorial imitation: one needs only think, for example, of ekphrasis, the device very much favored in the Renaissance. In order to analyze the metaphor of the self-portrait, we thus need to pay attention to the ways in which writing exploits its own spatial character. Borrowing a term from François Rigolot, we call this essential spatiality of the text its disposition. ⁶ Let us emphasize that writing, seen in its dispositional quality, no longer strives to emulate pictorial mimesis, and "representation" or, more precisely, the imaginary dimension of a text is no longer defined by its subsidiariness to the extra-textual reality called "self" but by its own rhetorical, logical, and poetical properties. ⁷

In Montaigne's case, the arrangement or disposition of the text is achieved by merely textual means such as the technique of additions and other inter-linguistic, syntactical means, which fundamentally affect the project of self-representation. We will thus examine the arrangement of the book, the structure of the particular...