Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne

6. "Qu'est-ce que la critique?" La Boétie, Montaigne, Foucault

“Qu’est-ce que la critique?” La Boétie, Montaigne, Foucault Marc Schachter In the chapter of his Essais entitled “De la diversion,” Montaigne contends that diversion—whether unintentional distraction or cultivated digression—offers the most effective strategy for resisting the tyranny of our passions and obsessions. Recounting and endorsing advice on how to avoid erotic tyranny in particular, he writes: (b)If your passion in love is too powerful, disperse it, they say; and they say true, for I have often tried it with profit. Break it up into various desires, of which one may be ruler and master, if you will; but for fear it may dominate and tyrannize you, weaken it, check it, by dividing and diverting it. When the capricious vein throbs in the restless member, PERSIUS Eject the gathered sperm in any body whatsoever. LUCRETIUS And see to it in good time, for fear it may be troublesome to you if once it has seized you: 122 6 la boétie, montaigne, foucault / 123 Unless by vagrant loves, a roving, vagrant boy, You cure your wounds when fresh, and old by new destroy. LUCRETIUS (III, 4, 634)1 Drawing on Persius’s Satires and Lucretius’s De rerum natura to illustrate his point, Montaigne proposes a two-part solution to the tyranny of eros. First, don’t resist sexual desire. But giving in comes with its own danger, namely that we might become overly attached to a single object. Montaigne thus also advises the promiscuous expense of seed in any available body in order to avoid subjection to a single overarching erotic investment. After explaining this practice, Montaigne reorients his own advice and, with an abrupt swerve towards a defense against a different passionate attachment—we might even think of it as a clinamen, Lucretius’ word for the spontaneous change in direction of an atom as it falls—critically alters the terms of the recommendation found in De rerum natura: I was once afflicted with an overpowering grief, for one of my nature, and even more justified than powerful. I might well have been destroyed by it if I had trusted simply to my own powers. Needing some violent diversion to distract me from it, by art and study I made myself fall in love. (III, 4, 634)2 While the practice of indiscriminate sex is a means to avoiding the tyranny of desire, Montaigne recounts here how he sought in the pursuit of love a carefully cultivated alteration of the terms of his subjection to something yet more terrible. “Love,” he explained, “solaced me and withdrew me from the affliction caused by friendship” (III, 4, 634).3 Jean Starobinksi has astutely related this passage to Montaigne’s mourning after the death of his dear friend Étienne de La Boétie. According to Starobinski, This confidence both discreet and exact leads us to imagine an escapade where the will to substitute a present object for a painful memory, a (heterosexual ) carnal fling for a (homosexual) spiritual commerce, dominated. The dedication to conquering a woman was part of the ‘work of mourning ’ for the lost friend.4 Starobinski’s insight into this intimate account elegantly unpacks Montaigne ’s rather cryptic remark, but one element in his interpretation requires modification. The diversionary challenge undertaken by Montaigne was not, or at least not at first, the conquest of a woman. The task at hand involved not seduction of another but rather work on the self. By art and by study, Montaigne made himself fall in love. What Starobinksi evocatively calls “the work of mourning” is also a form of critique in the sense given the word by Foucault in his 1978 talk “Qu’est-ce que la critique? [critique et Aufklärung]”: “the art of not being so governed” (38).5 In “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” Foucault identifies sixteenth -century Europe as an important period for the development of governmentality and corollary forms of resistance to the terms of governance. This resistance, what Foucault called critique in the talk, did not consist of an opposition proclaiming “we do not want to be governed and we do not want to be governed at all” (38),6 Foucault explained, so much as it was a perpetual questioning “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the names of these principals, with these certain goals and by means...