© Columbia University Press
The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays
February, 2009
Cloth, 240 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-11992-4
$29.50
/ £17.50
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 vantage points. He asked how shall I live? How can I know myself? And in so doing explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumatic memories; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and how to cope with and anticipate 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; it 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 scholar'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 of this highly original thinker 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.