This year's lecture is a continuation of last year's course. After laying the groundwork for a reflection on life writing that drew punctually on the authors cited - but there was more discussion of Stendhal and Proust than of Montaigne - the aim is now to work our way through the text of the Essays, in line with Montaign's idea that the interest of the hunt lies in the quest, rather than in the catch: "The agitation and the hunt is properly of our daily gisbier [...] for we are born to test the truth [...]" (II, 12); "Who loves hunting only in the taking, it does not belong to him to measure himself at our school" (III, 5). Montaigne is therefore at the heart of our "hunting ground" this year, from the angle of the presence of life in the writing of the Essais.
Last year, we focused on the current theory of the narrative self, developed by analytic moral philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, and introduced in France by Paul Ricœur. In a way, this contemporary doxa linking identity and narrativity reverses the presuppositions on which the critical thought of the seventies was based, by opposing the condemnation of life writing, its abuse and its aporia, carried in the twentieth century by Proust, Sartre, Barthes or Foucault.
This brief reminder of the road travelled last year could not avoid confronting the theoretical reflection carried out as part of this lecture with the very practice of life writing that accompanied it, right up to the publication, in autumn 2009, of Le Cas Bernard Faÿ, although there was no conscious contamination between these two undertakings. The reasons for this mutual ignorance between, on the one hand, the hand of the theorist preparing a weekly lecture on the writing of life, and on the other, that of the biographer tackling the writing of the life of a peer, also a Proust specialist, professor in the USA and then at the Collège de France, are what we had to try to elucidate, after the event. It was only when we looked back on this contradictory undertaking to decipher a life that its inquisitive dimension became apparent, its kinship with the approach of the detective who forces open the secrets of others, breaks into their existence, and finally seeks to give coherence to the events that make it up, in a hunt where the catch is not always the one we expected...
Montaigne's work offers a point of reference for resisting the commonplace notion of life as a narrative, which lies at the heart of contemporary ideology: "It is not my acts that I describe, it is me, it is my essence", he asserts in the chapter "De l'exercitation" (II, 6). The Essays allow us to grasp the historical moment of the transition from the classical genre of exemplary lives to the modern genre of individual and particular biography, from a diachronic perspective that the last lectures of the previous session had begun to sketch out, based on a rapid investigation of the very word biography.
By analyzing the fleeting moments of life, the epiphanies, the "tiny lives", the parentheses - such as the allusion to the death of his children in an addition to the first chapter of the Essays - that here and there dot the fabric of Montaign's text, we aim to grasp the relationship between the writing of life and the writing of the self, which marks the emergence of modern subjectivity. Montaigne's inflation of the ego reflects the substitution of a discourse of truth about a particular, approximate man for a discourse of exemplarity based on the examination of the conduct of great men. This is how we understand the famous opening formula of the chapter "Du repentir" (III, 2): "Les autres forment l'homme; je le recite et en represente un particulier bien mal formé, et lequel, si j'avoy à façonner de nouveau, je ferois vrayement bien autre qu'il n'est". The verb reciter here refers less to "self-narration" as a relationship of words, deeds and gestures, following a narrative that links them, than to the idea of listing, enumerating discontinuous events, sketching out life stories.
