Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne

14. "Mettre la theorique avant la practique": Montaigne and the Practice of Theory

“Mettre la theorique avant la practique” montaigne and the practice of theory Richard L. Regosin “Montaigne after theory, theory after Montaigne.” It strikes me, as it struck Derrida at the conference on communication in 1971, where he began his talk entitled “signature événement contexte” by interrogating the subject of the colloquium itself, that the terms of the timely, suggestive, and provocative title of our volume cannot simply be taken for granted, however familiar those terms are, and especially by those of us in sixteenthcentury French studies. Can we be confident as we speak of Montaigne and theory that we have a firm grasp of the meaning of the signifiers “Montaigne ” and “theory,” or are persuaded that their meaning is even reducible to a single, univocal, and totalizable sense? These two key words in our title are particularly complex and polysemous, heavily freighted and charged with semantic and semiotic significance that is diversely historical, philosophical, social, political, and literary. “Montaigne” is at once historical figure and literary persona, the writer of his essays and the writer in his essays, both the subject and object of the writing, creator of his text and its creation, the multi-faced and -faceted Montaigne produced by centuries 264 14 of critical reading, all this and more. Are we not finally uncomfortable with the signifier “Montaigne” as he claims to have been with himself: the more we know it and haunt it, the more its alterity amazes us, and the less we understand of it. “Theory,” too, does not represent—nor did it ever—a circumscribable content, an integral discipline, or a coherent field that could be demarcated once and for all, and mastered. We might say that theory is as expansive, as diverse, as conflicted, and as old as conceptual thought itself, ranging through history and sprawling across disciplines with a bewildering richness and unmanageable scope. Just in terms of the theory to which we in sixteenth -century French studies often refer, from Plato on there have been endless theories and counter-theories, theorists and anti-theorists, philosophical theories and political theories, social, economic, cultural, and linguistic and literary theories that continue to inform, condition, stimulate, haunt, and challenge our work. In graduate school in French in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and at Johns Hopkins where I was a student, theory would have meant literary theory from the Greeks to Wellek and Warren, but literary theory itself was not a discrete subject of study. Nor did anyone , as we now regularly do, speak simply of “theory.” We read as Aristotelians , formalist New Critics, literary historians, influenced by the perspectives and sensibilities of our teachers Nathan Edelman, Lionel Gossman , and René Girard, but we did not critically examine the theoretical assumptions that underpinned those readings or explicitly explore their implications, whether literary, social, philosophical, or political.1 After the 1966 symposium at Johns Hopkins University connected to structuralism and entitled “Les Langages Critiques et les Sciences de l’Homme,” which emphasized both “the pluralism of the existing modes of discourse and the interaction of disciplines not entirely limited to the conventional rubric of the ‘humanities,’” “theory” made its way into the academy as the American name for the richly diverse and sometimes contradictory expressions of mostly French contemporary philosophical, historical, linguistic , psychoanalytic, and anthropological thought.2 Since that time “theory ” has been referred to in the singular and used on its own, treated as if it were in fact singular and an identifiable object in itself, as if it offered an integral, coherent model for critical reading and interpretation, as if Structuralism , Deconstruction, Marxism, Feminism, and post-Freudianism, for example, could be reduced to a common conceptual core or matrix. This reification of “theory” has been abetted by a vociferous chorus of academics montaigne and the practice of theory / 265 and self-fashioned public intellectuals who have made the word into a pejorative , insisting that it represents not at all a broad range of probing, critical discourses that might help us open up reading by challenging accepted paradigms and practices, as others have argued, but an ideologically charged, insidious invasion of dangerous notions from abroad that have subverted literary culture and Liberal education in America and imperiled nothing less than the fundamental Enlightenment values that underpin Western civilization itself. There are only three words in our reversible title and two of them, the...