The performance of habit in Montaigne's ‘De mesnager sa volonté’
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
This article focuses on the concepts of habit and performance and how they relate to concepts of subjectivity in Montaigne's ‘De mesnager sa volonté’. Montaigne's chapter considers action on the political stage and contrasts two models for political action: impassioned activity and moderate engagement. I look at how Montaigne modulates his argument through Seneca and how metaphor is used to describe the ideal of interior integrity, a space for the self protected from the ‘outside’. This is then undercut by a temporal model of the self, informed by the Stoic notion of public life as a theatrical role and by scholastic concepts of custom and the habitus. For Montaigne, custom or habit supplements nature and renders our relationship to the natural problematic. I argue that in this chapter the self appears as a palimpsest, built up and consolidated over time. In this way each role or act could be considered performative in that they construct and constitute the individual. Finally, I argue that for Montaigne, the writing of the Essais is also performative, and that his ‘bonne foy’ is a fidelity to passage and becoming.
1 References throughout are to the Pléiade edition of Montaigne's
uvres complètes, ed. by Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris, Gallimard, 1962). The different stages of the text will be indicated by the conventional markers a (1580 edition, from which Book 3 was, of course, absent), b (1588 edition) and c (additions after 1588). ‘De mesnager sa volonté’, III, 10, pp. 980–1002 (p. 989b); the fragment of Petronius is taken from Justus Lipsius' De constantia. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2:7:139–40. 2 See, for example, Jules Brody, ‘De mesnager sa volonté (III: 10): lecture philologique d'un essai’, in Lectures de Montaigne (Lexington, French Forum, 1982), pp. 28–54; Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. by Robert Rovini (Paris, Gallimard, 1968), pp. 262–65; Géralde Nakam, Les ‘Essais’ de Montaigne miroir et procès de leur temps (Paris, Nizet, 1984), pp. 445–51; Jean Starobinski, Montaigne en mouvement (Paris, Gallimard, 1993), pp. 483–500.
3 For an alternative view of Montaigne's attitude towards Stoic prudence, see Gregory Sims, ‘Stoic Virtues/Stoic Vices: Montaigne's Pyrrhic Rhetoric’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23 (1993), 235–66. Sims argues that Montaigne surrounds his borrowings from Seneca with an ironic and sceptical veil that effectively denounces Stoic impassivity.
4 Epistulae morales, trans. by Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1962–67), 62 (I, 426–27). On economic discourse in Montaigne, see Philippe Desan, Les Commerces de Montaigne: le discours économique des ‘Essais’ (Paris, Nizet, 1992); and Nakam, Les ‘Essais’ de Montaigne, pp. 25–74.
5 III: 10, p. 981c; Epistulae morales 22 (I, 152).
6 De brevitate vitae, in Moral Essays, trans. by John W. Basore, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1965), II, 286–355; Montaigne's text is 3:1: ‘Nemo invenitur, qui pecuniam suam dividere velit; vitam unusquisque quam multis distribuit! Adstricti sunt in continendo patrimonio, simul ad iacturam temporis ventum est, profusissimi in eo, cuius unius honesta avaritia est’: ‘No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often close-fisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal’ (pp. 292–93).
7 See George Hoffmann, Montaigne's Career (Oxford, Clarendon, 1998), p. 33.
8 ‘Montaigne on property, public service, and political servitude’, Renaissance Quarterly, 56 (2003), 408–35.
9 ‘Boundaries and the sense of self in sixteenth-century France’, in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. by Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellbery (California, Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 53–63 (p. 56).
11 Seneca, De brevitate vitae 7:7, p. 306.
12 The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 123–26 and 184–85.
13 In a recent paper, André Tournon has argued that Montaigne's ideal of action privileges the process over the final goal: ‘"Plantant mes choux..." — action et projet’, Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne, 8th series, 17–18 (2000), 89–96 (p. 94).
14 On the theatrical life at Henri III's court, see Jacqueline Boucher, Société et mentalités autour de Henri III, 4 vols (Lille, Atelier de la reproduction des thèses, 1981), III, 1148–69.
15 Le Manuel d'Epictete (first printed 1591), in Les uvres du Sr du Vair (Rouen, David Geuffroy, 1622), pp. 781–82.
16 The Praise of Folly, 29, trans. by Betty Radice (London, Penguin, 1993), p. 44.
17 On the slippery concept of nature in Montaigne, see Ian Maclean, Montaigne philosophe (Paris, PUF, 1996), pp. 62–69.
18 On substance and its relation to essence, see Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 7; and Theodore Scaltsas, Substances and Universals in Aristotle's ‘Metaphysics’ (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994). For an analysis of Montaigne's ambivalence towards Aristotelian categories and his wide but often subversive use of scholastic terminology, see Maclean, Montaigne philosophe.
19 Montaigne borrows again from Seneca, Epistulae morales 16 (I, 108).
20 The ‘Adages’ of Erasmus, ed. by William Barker (University of Toronto Press, 2001), 4:9:25, pp. 374–75. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:11:4 (p. 115). On the relation between custom and nature in Montaigne, see Maclean, Montaigne philosophe, pp. 67–68; A. Micha, ‘Art et nature dans les Essais’, Bulletin de la société des amis de Montaigne, 19:2 (1956), 50–55. On the notion of custom as second nature, see Donald R. Kelley, ‘Altera natura: the idea of custom in historical perspective’, in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt, ed. by John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London, Duckworth, 1990), pp. 83–100.
21 Summa Theologiae, XXII, trans. by Anthony Kenny (London, Blackfriars, 1964), 1:2, question 53, article 1, pp. 82–83.
22 Summa 1:2, question 49, article 4 (p. 22).
23 My analysis here is indebted to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, Routledge, 1990).
24 Quoted in Thomas Greene, ‘The flexibility of the self in Renaissance literature’, in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. by Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 241–64 (p. 249).
25 ‘J'ai grand-peur que cette nature ne soit elle-même qu'une première coutume’: Pensées, in uvres complètes, ed. by Michel Le Guern, 2 vols (Paris, Gallimard, 1998–99), II, 578 (fragment 117).
26 ‘Because everything which is generated moves towards a principle, i.e. its end. For the object of a thing is its principle; and generation has as its object the end’: Metaphysics, trans. by Hugh Tredennick, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1968–69), 9:8:9 (I, 459). On matter and form, see Metaphysics, book 8; and Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, Clarendon, 1997), pp. 30–32.
27 On the Soul, trans. by W. S. Hett (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1964), book 2:1 (p. 66).
28 Les ‘Essais’ de Montaigne, p. 191.
29 Montaigne philosophe, p. 81.
30 I am very grateful to Neil Kenny and to Thomas Dixon for their invaluable advice and suggestions on versions of this article.