The author reads Michel de Montaigne's Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature, and politics. The friendship between Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie was ruled neither by plenitude nor lack, but by a capacity for recognition and transitivity. As an essayist, Montaigne is an exemplary practitioner of a technique of difference and recognition that puts all certainties of history, philosophy, and culture in the balance of weighted comparison. The essayist reveals how every absolute subjectivity or a ... More

The author reads Michel de Montaigne's Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature, and politics. The friendship between Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie was ruled neither by plenitude nor lack, but by a capacity for recognition and transitivity. As an essayist, Montaigne is an exemplary practitioner of a technique of difference and recognition that puts all certainties of history, philosophy, and culture in the balance of weighted comparison. The essayist reveals how every absolute subjectivity or authority is shaken by its internal weakness once we move inside the contrastive structure of domination in politics, gender, and race. The author's reading of the Essays strives to be faithful to the phenomenology of their embodied practices of reading-to-write to re-read and re-write. From this standpoint he engages the principal critical readings of the Essays over the last century that have examined with great brilliance their history, structure, and psychology. Whether the structure is evolutionary, structuralist, Marxist, or psychoanalytical, the author provides close readings of Montaigne's literary critics. By bringing to bear the ethico-critical practice of ‘essaying’ to resist the subjection of the Essays to dominant criticism, he reminds readers that Montaigne's appeal is in how he survived bloody cultural war with a balance of modesty and tolerance, invoking compromise where others practice violence.