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12. Montaigne’s Medieval Nominalism and Meschonnic’s Ethics of the Subject
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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c h a p t e r t w e l v e Montaigne’s Medieval Nominalism and Meschonnic’s Ethics of the Subject j a c k a b e c a s s i s In the words of Henri Meschonnic, “Nominalism is the only [theory of language ] that permits an ethics of subjects, thus a politics of subjects. It was already in the sentence of Montaigne: ‘Each man carries the entire form, of the human condition.’”1 My concern in this chapter is to link Montaigne’s formal arguments concerning the name and the sign to practical questions concerning ethics and politics, or more precisely, to the modalities of engagement in politics for a nominalist-skeptical thinker in the world as it is—“vivre du monde, et s’en prevaloir, tel qu’on le trouve” (to live in the world, and to take advantage of it, just as one finds it; III.10.1057).2 The primary thesis of this chapter is that nominalism allows for Montaigne’s skeptical yet active and constructive engagement with political realities, even those of cruel religious civil wars that were raging in France during the period of the writing of the Essais, 1562–98. These political realities cannot be underestimated as the palpable impetus behind the Essais’ break with previous discourses about the self in the world. Moreover, Montaigne’s alignment of language theory, ethics, and politics anticipates Henri Meschonnic ’s central thesis that language theory necessarily possesses historical and ethical dimensions; thus the title of his last book, Langage, histoire, une même théorie.3 Throughout Montaigne’s Essais there lies a single and urgent series of questions : How does a critical thinker, who is also a self-styled aesthete, conduct his life amidst the folly of the world, amidst what he aptly designates as this universal shipwreck, cet universel naufrage? What forms and what range of selfstylization are available to a critical and aesthetic agent who must live out his life in a determined social and historical context? What exactly would philosophically warrant such a dissonant existence? Could linguistic nominalism, namely the idea that ahistorical “universals” are empty concepts devoid of any Montaigne’s Medieval Nominalism and Meschonnic’s Ethics of the Subject 199 reality, except for wishful thought, become the theoretical foundation for a critical ethics of the subject (instead of an ethics of essentialized abstractions, collectivities ) in the midst of vicious civil wars of religion? In the Essais we encounter a series of answers to this tragic question; discourses written in the form of the “essayistic,” rather clear answers to these questions . Yet these answers are occluded perhaps by a certain surface profusion of diverse opinions, myriad quotations, anecdotes seemingly unrelated, jokes, and laughter already anticipating the baroque self-conscious narratives of Lawrence Sterne, Montaigne’s closest “fictional” analog.4 The essayistic is a new discourse, a new poetic manner of posing and partially answering the most fundamental of philosophical questions concerning the contingency of becoming in real historical time, the plurality of sound opinions, the susceptibility of opinions and beliefs—the tension, in sum, between a critical logos and a custom-based praxis and the multiple expressions one Michel de Montaigne could give these perennial yet urgent questions.5 Nominalism, in particular in its medieval resonances better known as the Quarrel of Universals, plays a major role in Montaigne’s conceptualization of the dissonances between thought and action, between the possibility of many realities and the crushing weight of a given reality not of one’s choosing, a reality that we always misperceive, a reality that is always arbitrary and misnamed in some absolute sense—if indeed such reality existed and were available to us. The apparent absence of the Middle Ages from Montaigne’s Essais has often been noted. Montaigne was, for the most part, the product of his Hellenistic and Roman readings, a product of the moral imagination of Plutarch and Seneca, among others. And in good Renaissance fashion Montaigne pretended to skip over the medieval period, as if it did not exist. Yet at least three times in the Essais Montaigne explicitly engages nominalism, a theory of language, or rather I would contend, a mode of thought, an ethics and a politics, clearly derived in his case from multiple medieval sources, though Occam’s conceptual semantics seem to dominate Montaigne’s discussions of nominalism. The first instance is the essay “Des Noms,” which starts with the pithy sentence “Quelque diversité d’herbes...