Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (review)

Zahi Zalloua’s Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism combines the best of the “poeticist” and the “contextualist” schools of Montaigne scholarship. As an antidote to the dilemma of choosing between analyses of the text or its historical context, Zalloua suggests that we need to get “outside” of this binary, and to examine the moi of the Essais “as emerging in a dynamic space situated precisely at the intersection of textuality and referentiality” (5). The book’s focus is the relation between ethics and a notion of the self as it is conceived skeptically in terms of multiple “others” presented in the Essais: Socrates, la Boétie, and the figure of the Amerindian “cannibal.” Zalloua’s thesis, which echoes scholars as diverse as Foucault, Levinas, La Capra, and Greenblatt, is that Montaigne’s “care” of these others is primarily ethical, and is essential to the essayist’s skeptical self- fashioning both within and as the writing of his text.

The first chapter applies this thesis to Montaigne’s “essaying” of Socrates: since one cannot definitively characterize the other in or as a fixed language, one is forced to “take care” of the often contradictory and inconclusive representations of the other, and of the self as other (31–32). Skeptical doubt hence characterizes Montaigne’s project of fashioning and taking care of himself, which in Zalloua’s reading becomes a hermeneutic fashioning and care of the exemplary other in/as the Essais. In other words, the essayistic practice of skepticism—the belief that knowledge is unattainable—leads to an ethics of self-care that accepts the self in its alterity, modeled upon the paradoxical alterity and familiarity of Socrates as an exemplary figure.

Chapter two examines Montaigne’s exemplary friendship with la Boétie. It analyzes two key metaphors for the lost friend: that of a mystical or Neo-Platonic “divine liaison,” and the topos of the friend as “another self,” borrowed from Aristotle and Cicero (78–81). The crucial passage of “De l’amitié” (par ce que c’estoit luy, par ce que c’estoit moy) represents the culmination of Montaigne’s “essaying” of his friendship, i.e., his attempt to “think differently” about la Boétie by juxtaposing their relationship with a series of exemplary others, and then transcending these discursive figures in order to express this “extra-discursive” emotion. Montaigne thus configures in writing the alterity of his friend while demonstrating the importance of this classically-mediated representation for the fashioning of his own writing self.

Within this ethical/skeptical paradigm, chapter three considers readings of Montaigne’s famous essays on Amerindian culture as an allegory for the French Wars of Religion. Zalloua sees “Des cannibales” and “Des coches” as moving beyond this kind of appropriation of the other in the rhetorical and cultural terms of the self. Montaigne’s move is rather to problematize the notion of the relation between self and other by recognizing the irreducibly polysemic nature of the Amerindians (124–25). Hence, while the chapter relates the essayist’s complex account of trauma among the invaded populations to his own traumatic context, it rejects the simple identification with these others that has been read in these essays in favor of a “desirable empathy” that Montaigne seeks to provoke in his readers. The conclusion describes the essayist’s “semantic reversals and transformations” of the figure of the cannibal as an attempt to “alter” his readers as skeptical/ethical subjects.

Zalloua’s conclusion briefly examines Montaigne’s tenure as mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585. It argues that Montaigne’s skeptical ethics enabled him to negotiate with relative success the difficult tensions that characterized these turbulent years. Zalloua sees Montaigne’s existence at this time as a consequence of his conception both of himself and of others within the skeptical “dialectic” of the Essais: “Montaigne the esprit genereux moves beyond the ancient ideal of self-mastery, making the respect for the other—for alterity in its diverse manifestations—central to his ethics of care” (163...