Abstract

This study explores the nature of the subject in Montaigne's Essays. ;The search for the Self is inextricably linked to the unstable nature of language; thus, representing the Self in writing is bound up with the problematic of mimesis. Using the Lacanian categories of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, I read the Montaignian text as seeking to overcome the impasse between the real and the symbolic. The Montaignian Self seeks to recuperate the body through a process of writing. ;Central to this study is the "Apology of Raimond Sebond" ; "Of Experience" becomes its respondent. These two essays are closely linked together as they foreground writing and the Self . ;The representation of a corporeal Self in language, echoes the Kristevean notion of a "sujet en proces"; that is to say a subject submitted, subject to the drives and desires of the body. Representing the body in/through writing, presupposes an initial sacrifice. The extent to which the text reveals sacrifice or pleasure, "jouissance", will be the extent to which the Montaignian Self can be called "en proces": in travail, and on trial against/with language as an unstable, arbitrary system of signs. ;The nature of the Self thus posited, language becomes the object against which the Montaignian subject wages war and love. Unresolved in a thematic sense, this tension resolves, dissolves itself in the "jouissance" of a process called writing: an action that produces a Book called trials, or Essays