Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I RHETORICS OF GENDER
- PART II FIGURES OF THE BODY
- A DISFIGURING THE FEMININE
- B THE TEXT AS BODY
- 8 My body, my text: Montaigne and the rhetoric of self-portraiture
- PART III ALLEGORIES OF REPRESSION
- Notes
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index of names
- Subject index
- Cambridge Studies in French
8 - My body, my text: Montaigne and the rhetoric of self-portraiture
from B - THE TEXT AS BODY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I RHETORICS OF GENDER
- PART II FIGURES OF THE BODY
- A DISFIGURING THE FEMININE
- B THE TEXT AS BODY
- 8 My body, my text: Montaigne and the rhetoric of self-portraiture
- PART III ALLEGORIES OF REPRESSION
- Notes
- Bibliography of works cited
- Index of names
- Subject index
- Cambridge Studies in French
Summary
Freud has more in common with Proust and Montaigne than with biological scientists, because his interpretations of life and death are always mediated by texts, first by literary texts of others, and then by his own earlier texts, until at last the Sublime mediation of otherness begins to be performed by his text-in-process. In the Essays of Montaigne or Proust's vast novel, this ongoing mediation is clearer than it is in Freud's almost perpetual self-revelation.
Harold Bloom, “Freud and the Poetic Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity”Montaigne's essay “Sur des vers de Virgile” (III, 5) promotes an anatomical discourse in which a metaphorical equivalence is established between text and body. The essayist seeks self-knowledge and displaces the self onto the figure of the body, a linguistic representation that mediates the intrapsychic dynamics of an author who is to be observed and analyzed. The study of the nature of artifice termed text inscribes within the essay a mirror which reflects the movement of the writer. Like Plato's Phaedrus, Montaigne's essay explores the problems of both love and rhetoric. However, Montaigne's chapter presumes a highly abstract concept of text and creates a figurative reversibility between sexuality and language, the anatomical representation of self as erotic other. In fact, what Montaigne terms “l'action genitale” functions, in part, as a metaphor for the generative act of writing: the project of writing about sexuality is most closely associated with self-representation and the lack which constitutes desire.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991