Michel de Montaigne : Du Discours sur la mort de La Boétie aux Essais
Une poétique de l’amitié
Luc Monnin | California State University San Marcos
Montaigne prefaces the works of Etienne de la Boétie with a letter that Montaigne supposedly wrote shortly after the sudden death of his friend, whose last enigmatic words to Montaigne were: “make a place for me”. A close examination of the intertexts and rhetoric of the letter reveals that it can be read as a failed attempt by Montaigne to respond to his friend’s wish. The letter, indeed, fails to offer a true literary place to his friend who ceased to be a privileged addressee or reader, to become an absent object of discourse mentioned in the third person. Montaigne will try to “make a place” for his dead friend elsewhere, while writing his Essais, by developing a polyphonic mode of writing functioning as a substitute to the lost friendship. It will be argued that in the Essais, friendship, more that a mere content of discourse, becomes a form of expression.
Article language: French
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Emmenegger, Camilla, Francesco Gallino & Daniele Gorgone
2021.
“Un livre scandaleux et diffamatoire”: Militant Translations of the Discours de la servitude volontaire.
TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction 34:2
► pp. 15 ff.
Calhoun, Alison
2017.
Montaigne’s Swerve: The Geometry of Parallels in the Essays and Other Writings.
Neophilologus 101:3
► pp. 351 ff.
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