Essaying Montaigne

John ONeill reads Montaignes Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature and politics. The friendship between Montaigne and La Botie 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. ONeills 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, ONeill provides close readings of Montaignes literary critics. By bringing to bear the ethico-critical practice of essaying to resist the subjection of the Essays to dominant criticism, ONeill reminds readers that Montaignes appeal is in how he survived bloody cultural war with a balance of modesty and tolerance, invoking compromise where others practice violence.