In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays
  • Kathleen Long
Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, x + 227 pp.

Quite simply put, The Fabulous Imagination is essential reading for any student or scholar of Montaigne's essays. Lawrence D. Kritzman analyzes the imagination, one of the intellectual faculties most theorized by early modern philosophers, as the hinge that both connects this seemingly distant period to our own and allows these periods to move together (and apart) in various revelatory ways. He consistently balances a profound understanding of Montaigne's essays with a broad and diverse knowledge of postmodern theory, in the process offering illuminating readings of these texts. The imagination both informs the constructions that Kritzman critiques—gender, sexuality, social identity, friendship, political hierarchies, cultural notions of death, family, illness, the law—and allows the subject to create his own narrative space relative to these, a space in which difference thrives. Kritzman begins with a meditation on the question of gender and Montaigne's critiques of the cultural construction of this category. This chapter offers cogent readings of the essays "On a Monstrous Child" ("D'un enfant monstrueux") and "On the Force of the Imagination" ("De la force de l'imagination"). Relative to the former, he demonstrates that the emphasis on the visual underscores the monster as an unclassifiable sign even as it reframes it as natural (rather than, as was often done in the early modern period, qualifying it as outside of the realm of nature). Similarly, a shepherd who cannot be classified as masculine because he lacks the appropriate sign (male genitals) nonetheless expresses a masculine sexuality, thus leading to a very different reading of masculine/ feminine difference seemingly contained within himself. In "On the Force of the Imagination," gender and sexuality seem largely driven by the imagination, and thus become unstable categories that shift with different circumstances and contexts. Given this instability, how can a fixed gender identity be established? Having already hinted at this connection in his first chapter, Kritzman extends this question to a broader epistemological realm in his second one. We engender monsters through "unbridled speculation" (Kritzman 54) and allow our reason to be dominated by the imagination, but not always in a liberating [End Page 258] way. We believe we know, in spite of the evidence of the instability of knowledge, and thus block the more pleasurable and creative aspects of the imagination in favor of a belief in the possibility of "absolute knowledge" (Kritzman 55). By questioning our understanding of gender identity, and of identity tout court, Montaigne counters our belief in the possibility of absolute, unchanging knowledge.

In this context, Kritzman reads Montaigne's friendship with Étienne de la Boëtie as a relationship of constant revision and renegotiation (in the third chapter), and his understanding of death as a constant testing of hypotheses and a constant "working through" of something which cannot be represented in any adequate way (in the fourth chapter). As Kritzman's study progresses, it becomes apparent that the imagination not only misleads us, but diverts us from that which we cannot understand as well as that which we cannot withstand. The imagination becomes not only a way of working through, but of working around, and thus a survival strategy for harsh times. This valorization of difference, and of the imagination as the space of difference, allows Marie de Gournay to imagine herself as a writer—and thus to become one—because Montaigne has imagined her thus. Kritzman returns to the visual nature of difference, first evoked in the reading of the monstrous child, in his chapter on "On Physiognomy" ("De la phisionomie"): "For Montaigne, the appearance of a thing always already constitutes its otherness, since our perception constrains us and allows what is seen to be viewed equivocally" (Kritzman 137–37). Here, the process of reading liberates the self from an "imaginary superego" (Kritzman 153). The essay "multiplies physiognomies and therefore refuses to eradicate difference." As becomes clear in Kritzman's final chapter, "Of Experience" ("De l'experience"), this difference resides within the self as well as in external objects and in the interplay between...

pdf

Share