L. D. Kritzman, The Fabulous Imagination. On Montaigne's Essays

KRITZMAN, Lawrence D., The Fabulous Imagination. On Montaigne's Essays, Irvington, Columbia University Press, 2009, 240 p.

ISBN 978-0-231-11992-4

RÉSUMÉ

Michel de Montaigne's (1533-1592) Essais was a profound study of human subjectivity. More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Montaigne embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. Asking how shall I live? How can I know myself? He explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumatic memories; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the act of anticipating and coping with death.
In this book Lawrence D. Kritzman traces Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self. For Montaigne imagination lies at the core of an internal universe that influences both the body and the mind. Imagination is essential to human experience. Although Montaigne recognized that the imagination can confuse the individual, "the fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship.
Kritzman begins with Montaigne's study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death. Kritzman concludes with Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion. His reading demonstrates that the mind's I, as Montaigne envisioned it, sees by imagining that which is not visible, thus offering an alternative to the logical positivism of our current age.

BIOGRAPHIE

Lawrence D. Kritzman is professor of French and comparative literature at Dartmouth and director of the Institute of French Cultural Studies. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford universities and is the author of several books on the French Renaissance. A frequent contributor to the media on French intellectual life, he is also editor of the Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought and the Columbia University Press series European Perspectives.