Overview

John O'Neill reads Montaigne's ""Essays"" from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature and politics. As an essayist Montaigne is a practitioner of a technique of difference and recognition that puts all certainties of history, philosophy and culture in the balance of weighted comparison. The essayist reveals how every absolute subjectivity or authority is shaken by its internal weakness once we move inside the contrastive structure of domination in politics, gender and race.O'Neill's reading of the ""Essays"" strives to be faithful to the phenomenology of their embodied practices of reading-to-write-to reread and rewrite. Whether the structure is evolutionary, structuralist, Marxist or pyschoanalytical, O'Neill provides close readings of Montaigne's literary critics. By bringing to bear the ethno-critical practice of ""essaying"" to resist the subjection of the ""Essays"" to dominant criticism, O'Neill reminds readers that Montaigne's appeal is in how he survived bloody cultural war with a balance of modesty and tolerance, invoking compromise where others practice violence.

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Professor John O'Neill is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto, a Member of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

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