Money and Magic in Montaigne : The Historicity of the "Essais"
Auteure: Edward Benson
Nombre de pages: 200Des prognostications presents our reading of the past as no more persuasive than of the future, and De la force de l’imagination reveals Montaigne calling attention to his own impotence in order to mask a “cure” for witchcraft he performed himself. Later still, in Des boyteux, he suffered a violent break with his readers. Edward Benson finds unwitting confirmation in late-twentieth-century studies of witchhunting of its importance in creating modern identity politics, and suggests that Montaigne’s temperamental conservatism allowed him to see the same thing. The scripteur also used monetary metaphors in Sur des vers de Virgile, devoted to a defense of sexual fantasizing, to challenge the supremacy not only of male readers but of “heterosexual” and, perhaps, even “white” ones. Montaigne brought these challenges together in Des coches, in which his historical judgement of his own culture was laid out before the subject of America was broached at all. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cinq essais qui sont autant de microlectures de Montaigne, reliées moins par le thème que par une...
