MONTAIGNE'S 'BLANCHEUR DE LA NEGE'
Describing Montaigne's retreat into the self has long constituted a commonplace in criticism of the Essuk. After the skeptical crisis of theA@++e, where the possibility of knowing anything outside of one's self seems lost, Montaigne regains a substantive subject in writing mostly about himself.] Closer examination of the Apologie reveals, of course, that skeptical argumentation dqes not spare the self either: whenever an object of knowledge is posited, it is subsequently removed by skepticism's pervasive attack. In the end, however, critics tend to agree that one substance remains, that one content is always retained, all skeptical protestations to the contrary. The self as substance reveals itself in the adherence to certain social values,* or as the center from which epistemological inquiry has been directed. 3 The development of a self from what is ubsoluteZy corrosive skepticism is usually treated elliptically, as if the self were an already delineated refuge from the horrors of total doubt. Instead of assuming the pre-existence and availability of this undefined refuge, I will examine an instance in the development of a specific self exactly from that corrosiveness of skeptical argumentation. This self arises out of a formal interdependence of skeptical argumentation and certain functions of the body, as Montaigne represents them in the ApoZogie. 4 This interdependence is a guarantee, finally, against the conceptual uporia of self-knowledge.
In the insistent dislodging, discharging of pieces of human knowledge from their seemingly safe places, in this expelling movement characteristic of the Apologie de Raimond ,Sebond, Montaigne uses arguments collected from skepticism's commonplaces available to the Renaissance: from Hemi Estienne's translation of Sextus Empiricus and Cicero's Acudemica to contemporary compilations of medical and scientific untruths such as Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine scientiarum (1527) and Laurent Joubert's Erreurspopulaires (1578). s The abundance and variety of arguments in the Apologie point to an implicit reliance on accumulation and copiousness for persuasion; the skeptical arguments and examples function logically but also, and perhaps more importantly, materially, overwhelming the reader with a series of opaque fragments troubling his conceptual perspective and his self-satisfaction. If the skeptical arguments are not used primarily as a formal logical structure, that is, if their soundness and validity are rhetorically insufficient, then the reader's attention can and perhaps should focus on the not-so-innocent content of their propositions and examples.
Skeptical texts, or summaries of skeptical positions, repeat certain arguments and examples and often attribute them to certain philosophers. Statements about sense perception that "everyone would agree on" usually are commonplace, and serve as markers facilitating recognition of the position about to be put forth. Thus we find for example three statements Neophilologus 69 (1985) 525-532