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Friendship between humanism, hermeneutics and fiction
Our preview of Montaigne – La Boétie: a ténébreuse affaire (Odile Jacob, August 2024, cited as MBA) has Philippe Desan – Howard L. Willett Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, among other things editor of the Montaigne Studies and author of the authoritative book Montaigne: a political biography Since 2014, he has changed his field of study without abandoning his subject. The scholar, to whom the Académie française awarded the Grand Prix for his work, presents a historical crime novel. This is not merely a divertissement of a late work, but a meticulously calculated experiment: a researcher who has spent half a lifetime measuring the boundary between Montaigne's life and Montaigne's book now tests this boundary using the tools of fiction. This essay reads the book in three stages – as a novel about a friendship, as a novel about reading, and as an encrypted self-disclosure by the Montaigne scholar.
To understand which reading tradition Desan is writing against, it is worth taking a look at Hugo Friedrich's Montaigne (1949) – and this is no coincidence, for Desan himself edited Friedrich's work and wrote the introduction for the 1991 English edition. In the first chapter, Hugo Friedrich praises Montaigne's courage to embrace subjectivity – explicitly as a historically situated virtue. He writes that courage and rigor of subjectivity are needed precisely in those historical moments when a tradition ossified in formalism stifles the individual and blocks their access to concrete humanity. Montaigne's skepticism thus appears as resistance against a rigid system – and Friedrich openly names the opposing concept: The Trials They dissolved the idea of a totalitarian science. This phrase, used in 1949 and linked to the image of a mind being suffocated by the system, can hardly be read without a political overtone.
Friedrich reads the Trials as part of a philosophical anthropology of post-classical Europe, and constantly emphasizes Montaigne's roots in the humanist heritage and the Western educational tradition. His Montaigne is a witness to a continuous European culture that stretches from antiquity through the Renaissance to modernity. The conclusion also points in this direction: Montaigne's cheerful and serene character, a wisdom that offers the devalued human being neither despair nor false hope of salvation, but rather an affirmation of his mortality, is the gesture with which an author in 1949 counters nihilism with a humanist affirmation of life. Frank Rutger Hausmann 1 Friedrich's work is placed in a series with other monumental works of German post-war Romance studies (such as Erich Auerbach's). mimesis or Ernst Robert Curtius' Europäische Literatur und lateinisches MittelalterHowever, a distinction is necessary: Auerbach and Curtius wrote from exile or from a place of inner detachment, while Friedrich had spent the Nazi years in a university position in Germany. His invocation of humanism therefore also carries a note of self-affirmation and assertion of continuity, which tends to obscure rather than confront his own complicity – further explaining the striking absence of any direct reflection on the period in the preface.
Friedrich reads Montaigne within the grand tradition of Romance intellectual history as a unified whole and specifically opposes the fragmenting dissection of his work into isolated "-isms": Skepticism, Epicureanism, and the like are merely the components of a highly organized mind whose coherence is lost as soon as it is split into two parts, one looking backward and one looking forward. Methodologically, he defends Montaigne's apparent disorder as an essential characteristic – the Trials were not through articulation, but through coacervatio, built through deliberate accumulation – and consciously contrasts it with Kant's concept of system: Anyone who reduces the work to a central idea like "Que sais-je?" misses its breadth, because contradiction is not a deficiency, but a constant symptom of the infinitely restless mind, which is interested in the ever-new experience, but not the result. In terms of content, Friedrich elevates Montaigne to the founder of modern moralism, which he sharply distinguishes from ethics: It has little to do with morality, but rather with customs and traditions; its proponents are neither educators nor ethics teachers, but observers, analysts, and shapers of human nature. The generic concept of "human being" is replaced by the idea of diversity, variety, and difference. Unlike Desan's own polemic in Thinking about social issues While suggesting that Friedrich attributes to the three-stage scheme of humiliation, acceptance, and wisdom, Friedrich does not depict a seamless line of maturation; his point is, conversely, the inexhaustible mobility of a mind that no system can capture – a difference that is rather gradual, since Desan's anti-idealistic thrust is also directed against the assumption of unity, not against Friedrich's thesis of mobility.
Nevertheless, a difference remains, which is where Desan begins his analysis. Friedrich seeks the unity of a highly organized mind and takes Montaigne's self-interpretation—the "livre consubstantiel à son autheur"—as the key to a truthfulness in which the individual, through writing, creates his own image. Desan has rejected this connection of truth to the coherent person in his scholarly work; already in the introduction to Friedrich, he cautiously distances himself—"it is perhaps necessary to dissociate ourselves from Friedrich's statement"—and transforms the moralist into an "anthropologist of moral man," the timeless observer into an early bourgeois thinker whose skepticism arises from the concrete crisis of the late Renaissance. Where Friedrich emphasizes the organic coherence of a style of thought, Desan emphasizes its historical contingency, strategy, and social entanglement. This very shift—from the consubstantial self to the socially constructed person—is the novel's tacit premise: MBA shatters the idea of a Montaigne whose book would be transparent to his soul. A Montaigne who might have poisoned his friend and buried the crime in the cover of his own work is anything but a transparent self-portrait.
Fiction as a legitimate instrument of knowledge
The preface as a contract: one's own untruth becomes a condition of truth.
Desan opens with a gesture that every Montaigne reader will immediately recognize. The first line – “C'est ici un roman de bonne foi, lecteur” – is a literal adaptation of Montaigne’s famous “C'est ici un livre de bonne foi, lecteur”, with the single, crucial substitution of free through the power of novelThe book's program lies in this single exchanged word. The narrator warns, "that it is a fiction, but a plausible fiction, informed by the biography of a man who wrote a book of essays." Fiction is not introduced as the opposite of truth, but as its probability-laden extension.
Desan derives the legitimacy of this procedure from the subject matter itself. He quotes Montaigne's affirmation of the permeability of history and invention: "In my investigation of our customs and behavior, invented accounts serve me, insofar as they are possible, just as well as true ones." 2 The novelist takes the essayist at his word 3 and transforms a methodological aside by Montaigne into the foundational text of an entire book. If the possible is considered equally valid as the actual, then a novel about Montaigne is not a betrayal of scholarship, but rather its consistent continuation by other means.
The preface's wealth of allusions extends beyond individual quotations. By paving the book's threshold with Montaigne's own threshold formula, Desan establishes a reading protocol: the reader is meant to read twice from the very first line, to constantly hear the essay's pretext within the novel's text. This is more than scholarly coquetry. It shifts genre expectations. A historical detective novel usually promises the solution of a mystery with certainty; Desan's preface, however, announces that the solution itself will be an invention—"assurément une fiction"—that the reader will thus be sworn not to truth, but to probability. The "bonne foi" that Montaigne extended to the reader tips in Desan's hands into a paradoxical sincerity: the narrator is honest precisely by declaring his untruth. The motto preceding the preface – Montaigne's wish to speak not of events, but of "de ce qui peut advenir" – elevates this priority of the possible over the done to the level of a motto.
The Epicurean Klinamen Poetics
Desan imbues his method with a physical metaphor, which in turn stems from Montaigne's readings. Épicure, he writes, was among Montaigne's favorite authors, who appreciated his atomic theory. From this, Desan draws his narrative conclusion: "Through the tiny and unintentional displacement of a single atom, our world changes in an unexpected way." 4 The novel works in the same way – “minor deviations in the events, encounters or decisions of the protagonists reshape reality and thus create another world that is equally possible” 5.
This is a precise poetics-based self-description. Desan doesn't change the overall political climate of history; he shifts individual atoms—a vanished sonnet, a poisoned vial, an ex-voto with green eyes—and from these minimal deviations, he creates an alternative, flawlessly probable world. clinamenEpicurean deviation becomes the structural principle of a counterfactual Montaigne biography. The irony that Desan later employs is bittersweet: Montaigne found it strange that Epicurus's atoms had never coalesced into a house or a shoe—"ironically, however, they had helped to uncover his crime." 6The same atoms that are in TrialsSkepticism, which served as an image of absurd contingency, provides forensic proof in the novel in the form of arsenic residues.
A narrative architecture of precarious equilibrium
Desan describes the inner workings of his text using the image of a clock. The events intertwine imperceptibly, "a bit as if history and fiction were fighting to prevail, but every time one seems to gain the upper hand, the clock's pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, restoring a fragile equilibrium." 7This formula names not only a theme, but also the structure: The characters in the first two parts are all real, but "parfois, la réalité est légèrement altérée et provoque des répercussions imprévues." The novel is organized as cold case Over almost five centuries – an investigation whose solution is itself fiction, but whose narrative, according to Desan, finds its way back to history, “as if to clear the fog.” Once again, Montaigne guarantees: “the writer must only account for a plundered truth.”
The three-part architecture of a fatal friendship: from poisoning to the courtroom of hermeneutics
Part One – The Sixteenth Century as the Time of the Crime
The first part sets the action in Bordeaux in 1559, at the Parliament, within the milieu of the "robins"—that legal aristocracy to which both Montaigne and La Boétie belong. Desan stages the two men's first encounter as a rhetorical duel over "coutume," custom, in which the young, ambitious Michel, with calculated audacity, leads the celebrated "Maître du Palais" astray. La Boétie sees through the intervention, rehearsing it "like a theatrical rehearsal." 8That one was witnessing actors' monologues rather than an enlightened conversation. This theatrical metaphor is programmatic: friendship appears from the outset as a performance, as role-playing, not as the transparent soul community of the canonical "De l'amitié".
Herein lies Desan's narrative leverage. The famous friendship is reinterpreted as an asymmetry, indeed as a deception. The novel systematically exposes that everything we know about La Boétie is mediated through Montaigne – thus placing a genuinely philological question in the service of the crime plot.
Remarkable is the meticulous care with which Desan reconstructs the social fabric in which this encounter takes place. Young Michel is stuck in the Chamber of Inquiries, wearing the red robes of the second-rate officials, while the councilors of inquiry, in black, are considered the true magistrates. La Boétie instructs him on the situation of the "robins," those social climbers, "from the same world of negotiation, but they dream only of noble birth." These passages are not mere color; they infuse the novel with Desan's scholarly conviction that Montaigne's writing arose from a political and social strategy, not from world-weary contemplation. The rapprochement with La Boétie appears here as a career move, recommended by his father, Pierre Eyquem, who desires the long robe for his son and the slate for himself. Where the idealistic tradition celebrates friendship as a pure choice of souls, Desan shows its roots in ambition, marriage politics and status anxiety – thus laying the foundation for the web of motives from which the later murder hypothesis derives its plausibility.
Part Two – Tradition as a Crime Scene
The second part traces the journey of a document over centuries: a thirtieth, compromising sonnet by La Boétie, which Montaigne's widow, Françoise de la Chassaigne, finds after his death and is unable to destroy. Desan transforms the bookbindery into a scene of concentrated symbolism. Françoise has the manuscript of the Trials She bound it magnificently in gilded parchment – and hid the sonnet between the endpaper and the cover, inscribed with a coded clue. Her gesture was a revenge disguised as piety: "It remains for future generations to decipher its revelation, she told herself." 9 The document becomes "a bottle thrown into the sea". 10.
Desan counts the time spent in oblivion with the pedantic precision of a bibliographer: The sonnet will be forgotten for “192 years and four months – more precisely, 70.166 days.” 11 spend. This almost manic precision is no accident. It betrays the collector and textual scholar for whom the materiality of the text—binding, trimmed edges, erased autograph lines—is not a secondary matter, but the actual stage. The widow, who wants to reunite book and corpse in the Feuillants' chapel, makes a macabre point of Montaigne's own dictum that he was "consubstantial" with his book: "It's as if she placed the poem in her mortal habit."
Part Three – The Present as a Courtroom
The third part jumps to the academic present day. Jacques Saint-Maur, a French-born Montaigne specialist at an obscure university in Iowa and an obsessive collector of Trials-Expenditures, leads his gifted doctoral student Diane Osborne to the trail. Her thesis is scandalous: Montaigne poisoned La Boétie. The presentation of evidence culminates in a Parisian defense at the Sorbonne, which Desan openly portrays as a trial: "la thèse se transformait en procès, et Diane devrait assumer son rôle de procureur." The defense of the work becomes a "règle requirement, without the possibility of appeal."
Diane relies on the key words from "De l'amitié", in which Montaigne describes his friendship as "an inexplicable and fateful force". 12 Her entire dissertation, she explains to the jury, attempts to explain these two words: “Pourquoi inexplicable? et fatale pour qui?” A canonical turn of phrase in friendship prose becomes a suspicion of a crime. Her interpretation sees the relationship as a misunderstanding between two incompatible models of affection – La Boétie in search of the “licence grecque,” Montaigne as a “homme à femmes” who rejects this ancient practice. The philology of eye color – green, in only one to two percent of the southwestern French population – is supposed to identify the hidden lover Marguerite on the ex-voto and provide the motive for murder.
Diane's feminist chain of evidence
Particularly revealing is the episode in which Diane constructs an entire edifice of evidence from Montaigne's remarks about women's eyes. With the meticulousness of a concordance, she collects the passages where the essayist describes the "douceur des yeux," the "yeux chastes," the "yeux effarouchés," or the "grâce de leurs yeux," and concludes from this an obsession that is also intrusive: he is convinced he can read his lover's eyes, projects his desires onto them, and interprets a mere blink as consent. The rhetorical climax of her argument is an accusation: "How many women had to endure his sexual assaults simply because they blinked or fluttered their eyelashes once?" 13
Desan treats this passage with calculated ambivalence. On the one hand, he gives Diane's interpretation space and dignity; on the other hand, he has Saint-Maur internally conclude that this feminist discourse will "not get her very far" with the soutenance. 14The scene exemplifies the fundamental hermeneutic problem of the entire novel on a small scale: a coherent thesis can be constructed from a collection of textual clues, a thesis that sounds convincing yet rests on a leap from the probable to the asserted. The green eye color on the ex-voto, statistically elevated to an identifying mark, is the prime example: an inherently reliable piece of information transformed into forensic evidence through interpretive ambition. Desan, the experienced jury member, knows how closely philological brilliance and overreach are intertwined—and makes this proximity itself the subject of his analysis.
The novel as the researcher's hall of mirrors
Saint-Maur as a self-portrait
The character Saint-Maur unmistakably bears traits of his creator. Both received their doctorates in California in 1984; both are French-American Montaigne scholars in the USA; both are passionate collectors. Saint-Maur's private library, which surpasses those of Harvard and Chicago and becomes the "Bibliotheca Mauriana," directly mirrors Desan's real "Bibliotheca Desaniana" with its approximately 161 editions of Montaigne. The novel ends with Saint-Maur's intention to move to Boulder, Colorado—and the preface is dated "De Boulder, Colorado." The mask is intentionally transparent.
Desan uses this self-portrait to dramatize his own methodological position. Saint-Maur embodies the researcher for whom purely text-immanent interpretation is insufficient, "for the simple reason that the person behind the book has always been neglected in literary studies." 15Against the tradition that absorbs Montaigne's entire life into his book, he sets the "materiality of the text" and a "material culture of the Renaissance." This is, barely disguised, the contextual-sociological program that has always distinguished Desan's scholarly work from idealistic Montaigne philology—here ironically exaggerated to the point of "theory—much judged by his colleagues"—about objects as mediators between world and imagination.
Desan's affectionate irony in portraying his alter ego protects the work from mere self-aggrandizement. Saint-Maur is a comic figure: the failed cyclist who displays his small lead weights on the fireplace, who claims to have met Sartre in The Two Magots and preaches to his students to always say no first, who forces Marx and Montaigne together, and the Capital in the French first edition of 1872, which he made required reading for his seminar. The self-caricature allows Desan to reveal his own methodological obsession – the connection between historical materialism and the essay form, which the real author in Montaigne's Modernity He is pursued – simultaneously presenting and relativizing his findings. The researcher laughs at himself in order to be able to speak seriously about his field. When Saint-Maur ultimately considers writing either a novel about Montaigne and La Boétie or a book about Montaigne's modernism, the circle is complete: the character announces precisely the work that his creator has already written.
The thesis of research as fiction
Desan puts the sharpest punchline in the mouth of his young protagonist. After the failed soutenance, Diane confesses that she has realized that university research itself is a form of fiction: "The more I worked, the more I realized that academic research is a form of fiction. You have to invent, formulate hypotheses, develop theories, and distinguish yourself from other interpretations." 16 This insight forms an ideological core of the novel. The detective plot was merely the vehicle to make the relationship between hypothesis formation and narrative invention visible.
Significantly, Diane fails precisely because she believes in a single, universal truth – “I am not a big reader of Montaigne, because he believed that truth is subjective and malleable.” 17She demands firm, irrefutable certainties and therefore feels "closer to the sciences than to the humanities." Desan thus reverses the usual hierarchy: not the skeptical Montaignetist, but the positivist-minded researcher proves to be the inferior reader of Montaigne. The novel defends Montaigne's doubt—"Que sais-je?"—against the truth-seeking of its own heroine.
The author's ironic apotheosis
The ending is marked by telling irony. The scandal benefits no one more than the accused. "Montaigne s'en était quant à lui sorti indemne," it is said; one does not so easily topple a "pillar of French thought." The New YorkerThe article entitled “L’affaire Montaigne” treats the affair as a lesson in “academical Byzantine Byzantineism” on both sides of the Atlantic – and the sales figures of the Trials are exploding on Amazon. The author proceeds from the accusation “grandi and plus populaire que jamais face aux ergotages savants de ceux qui faisaient profession de lere et de l'interpreter”.
Therein lies Desan's sharpest point, directed at his own field. The attempt to unmask Montaigne with forensic rigor only confirms his indestructibility; the scholars who interpret him appear smaller than their subject. In the end, Saint-Maur burns the photographic evidence of the sonnet and chooses oblivion – "He had sufficiently internalized Montaigne's teachings on repentance to carry on." 18The researcher erases his own sensation, and thus the novel returns to the initial thesis of its preface: secrets, "inaccessible and unspeakable". 19They accompany every person throughout their life; invention allows us to reveal them, even to judge them – but whether the revelation will last remains an open question.
The work within the work
Political biography as a quarry
Who visites Montaigne: a political biography Anyone who has read (2014) will recognize the first part of the novel as its narrative resolution. Desan's main biographical thesis is that the Montaigne author is a nineteenth-century invention; the specialists created a "universal and atemporal Montaigne" while overlooking "the royal servant and public officer," who always aligned his writing strategies with career calculations. It is important "to dismantle the clichéd image that portrays the essayist as isolated in his tower, far removed from the hustle and bustle of his time." 20The novel vividly portrays this demystification: young Michel approaches La Boétie not out of a kindred spirit, but on the advice of his father, who desires the long gown for his son and upward mobility from the merchant class for the family. The entire mechanism of the "robins"—that legal aristocracy "who come from the same business world"—is analyzed soberly in the biography. 21 was and “only dream of chivalric glory” 22 —becomes the stage for their first encounter in the novel. What the biography formulates as a socio-historical thesis, the novel dramatizes as a motif: the famous friendship develops in a field of ambition, marriage politics, and status anxiety, and it is precisely this field that provides the basis for the murder hypothesis. Montaigne's dictum, "Le Maire et Montaigne ont tousjours esté deux d'une separation bien claire" (The mayor and Montaigne have always been separated by a clear distinction), which Desan exposes in the biography as a self-stylization not to be taken at face value, reappears in the novel—now as the separation between public facade and hidden private secret, which the entire plot seeks to break down.
Desan's major sociological work Montaigne, penser le social (2018) sees itself as a continuation of the biography “from practice to theory” and reads Montaigne, along with Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Elias, as an “individu collectif” whose self “has meaning only in its relation to others.” It emphatically rejects the psychologizing tradition that explains the work in terms of character—and, somewhat pointedly, includes Friedrich among its representatives because he makes the unity of a style of thought and the consubstantiality of man and book the axis of interpretation. In the novel, this academic program is shifted to Saint-Maur’s character psychology and simultaneously caricatured. The former Trotskyist, who forces Marx and Montaigne together, seeks the truth about the essayist in the “materiality of the text” and in a “material culture of the Renaissance.” he complains that “l'homme derrière le livre était toujours absent de l'interpretation littéraire”. This is Desan's anti-idealistic credo, exaggerated into the comically obsessive: where the scientist... Trials Analyzed as "social object" and "social fact," the novel's protagonist hunts down real objects—a small bottle, an ex-voto, a sonnet—whose materiality is supposed to prove the murder. The novel pushes the sociological thesis to its limits and beyond: the legitimate demand to read the book in its material and social context becomes the "far-fetched theory" that objects can bear witness to a crime. In doing so, Desan tests his own method for its scope—and its temptation.
The Unspoken Sonnet and the Editorial Strategies
The most subtle connection concerns the heart of the plot, the hidden sonnet. In his political biography, Desan extensively discusses Montaigne's 1571 edition of La Boétie's works and emphasizes that Montaigne... Speech of voluntary servitude although he wanted to publish it Memo However, about the January edict “préféra passer sous silence” – an act of “déminage préventif en matière de politique éditoriale”. In Thinking about social issues The same motif returns: Montaigne's initial desire to... Discourse “au cœur de ses Trials“to place, and his subsequent withdrawal in the face of the Protestant appropriation of the text. The question of what Montaigne transmitted from La Boétie and what he suppressed is therefore not a novelistic invention, but a real philological crux in Desan's research. The novel radicalizes it into a criminal hypothesis: If Montaigne curated his friend's legacy so carefully, what else, the plot asks, could he have concealed? The fictional thirtieth sonnet, which Françoise hides in the book's cover, is the narrative embodiment of those editorial gaps that Desan, as a scholar, has mapped—the point at which tradition falls silent and interpretation must begin. Diane's thesis of support, that everything about La Boétie is “unique in meaning” because “no text by La Boétie was printed by his living” and Montaigne controls the transmission, is a literal translation of Desan's philological Findings translated into the language of the prosecution.
The English Friedrich edition as a hinge
The fact that Hugo Friedrich, whose book on Montaigne Desan edited and introduced, is present in the novel as a negative foil closes the circle between the works. In the Friedrich introduction, Desan formulates an observation that would become the novel's poetics: Montaigne always transcends the story before him and creates "a new object that he brings back to himself"; from two accounts, the superior mind chooses "the one that is more likely"—the more probable one. This very privilege of the probable over the merely factual, which Desan described in Montaigne in 1991, becomes the structural principle of his own novel in 2024, whose preface prioritizes fiction over fact, provided it remains "vraisemblable." Friedrich's own insight, which Trials The ever-renewing experience of “but not the result” is of interest and reappears in the novel as its ideological core—in Diane’s realization that research itself is a form of fiction, and in her failure to achieve “certainties, firm and irrefutable.” The common vanishing point of Friedrich’s monograph, Desan’s scholarship, and his novel is the same Montaigne whom Friedrich described as an “infinitely moving mind”: a mode of thinking that locates truth in the process, not in the result, and which therefore eludes every system—even that of forensic evidence. Where Desan goes beyond Friedrich is in the consequence for the individual: where Friedrich still captures this fluidity within the unity of a consubstantial self, Desan dissolves even this last unity and reveals a Montaigne whose book no longer guarantees a transparent soul, but can conceal secrets. Thus, the scientific books and the novel prove to be a single project pursued through various genres: the persistent refusal to let Montaigne rest in the comfortable assumption that his work completely coincides with his self.
MBA is more than a scholarly game, even if Desan modestly describes it in his Remerciements as an "educated divertissement" and a "game with Montaigne," but also as an idea maturing over twenty years. The book is a fictional treatise on the conditions of Montaigne scholarship, written by one of its most important representatives, who places himself in the dock as a character in the novel. It demonstrates that every interpretation is a hypothesis and therefore a narrative; that the boundary between biography and invention, which Montaigne was the first to systematically explore in the sixteenth century, causes the same unease in the twenty-first century. The reference in the title—Balzac's "dark affair" intertwined with the detective novel as a philosophical form—is therefore not merely decorative. Desan chose the crime genre because, as a literary technique, it can make hermeneutics itself the plot: reading means developing suspicion, interpreting clues, constructing a story that is probable but never provable. That this specialist, of all people, formulated this insight not in a monograph but in a novel is the most consistent homage to an author who equated the possible with the actual.
The book's central message, as a lesson, can be summarized as follows: Interpretation is inevitably an inventive act, working with probabilities, and intellectual honesty does not consist of discovering the ultimate truth about Montaigne, but rather in remaining aware of one's own narrative techniques. From this follows, perhaps as an uncomfortable lesson of the novel: distrust of one's own coherence. For the murder hypothesis does not fail because it is poorly constructed—on the contrary, it is elegant, materially supported, and flawlessly plausible. It fails because its very coherence reveals how much interpretative ambition was required to make the leap from the probable to the asserted invisible. What captivates Diane about her thesis—the clean chain of evidence, the coherent motive, the forensic confirmation—is precisely what should serve as a warning to the experienced reader. Desan directs this warning not only at the radical doctoral student, but at every interpretation, including his own: the more perfectly an interpretation eliminates the resistance of its object, the more it has already replaced that object with its own invention. Montaigne's doubt is therefore not a flaw in the researcher who arrives at no result, but rather his very virtue—the willingness to recognize his own history as history and not to confuse it with truth. That the researcher ultimately burns his evidence and chooses oblivion is the ultimate consequence of this stance: some coherences are too perfect to be trusted.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- See the afterword by Frank Rutger Hausmann to the German edition and his essay: Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne”, Scientia Poetica: Yearbook for the History of Literature and Science 18, Issue 1 (2014): 241–59. >>>
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- “I'm sure you'll read the letter”>>>
- “Par le déplacement négligeable et non prémédité d'un seul atome, notre monde se métamorphose de manière inattendue.”>>>
- “De minimes variations de faits, de rencontres, ou de decisions prises par les protagonistes, réorganisent la réalité pour créer un other world tout also possible”>>>
- “Ironiquement, ils avaient en revanche permis de révéler son crime”>>>
- “A piece of history and fiction is lived in battle for the imposer, mais, who has the emporium ensemble, the balance of the watch is balanced in the opposable senses and creates a pre-equipped equilibrium.”>>>
- “comme a réplique de theater”>>>
- “Aux générations futures de déchiffrer sa révélation, se dit-elle.”>>>
- “bouteille jetée à la mer”>>>
- “Cent quatre-vingt-douze ans et quatre mois dans l'oubli – soixante-dix mille cent soixante-six jours, plus exactement”>>>
- “a force inexplicable and fatale”>>>
- “Combien de femmes ont-elles subi ses aggressions sexuallys pour un simple clignement d'œil ou un battement de paupières ?”>>>
- “Ne la mènerait pas bien loin”>>>
- “Pour la bonne raison que l'homme derrière le livre était toujours absent de l'interpretation littéraire”>>>
- "Plus je travaillais, plus je suis rendu compte que la recherche universitaire est une forme de fiction. Il faut inventor, lancer des hypothèses, élaborer des théories, se démarquer des autres interpretations.">>>
- “Je ne suis pas une bonne lectrice de Montaigne, car il croyait que la vérité is subjective et malléable”>>>
- “Avait suffisamment médité les leçons de Montaigne sur le repentir pour aller de l'avant”>>>
- “inaccessible and inavowable”>>>
- “démythifier l'image d'Épinal qui présente l'essayiste isolé dans sa tour, loin des agitations de son temps”>>>
- “issus you même monde du négoce”>>>
- “ne rêvent que de noblesse d'épée”>>>
