Acknowledgments Introduction: Montaigne Is Theory Part I. Monster Theory 1. Montaigne's Fantastic Monsters and the Construction of Gender 2. Representing the Monster: Cognition, Cripples, and Other Limp Parts in "Des boyteux" (III, 11) Part II. Death Sentences 3. Montaigne's Fraternity: La Boetie on Trial 4. Montaigne on Horseback, or the Simulation of Death 5. The Anxiety of Death: Narrative and Subjectivity in "De la diversion" (III, 4) 6. Excavating Montaigne: The Essayist on Trial Part III. Philosophical Impostures 7. The Socratic Makeover: The Ethics of the Impossible in "De la phisionomie" (III, 12) 8. Romancing the Stone: "De l'experience" (III, 13) Notes Works Cited Index

In this exhilarating and learned book on Montaigne's essays, Lawrence D. Kritzman contemporizes the great writer. Reading him from today's deconstructive America, Kritzman discovers Montaigne always already deep into a dialogue with Jacques Derrida and psychoanalysis. One cannot but admire this fabulous act of translation. -- Helene Cixous, author of White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics Throughout his career, Lawrence D. Kritzman has demonstrated an intimate knowledge of Montaigne's essays and an engagement with French philosophy and critical theory. The Fabulous Imagination sheds precious new light on one of the founders of modern individualism and on his crucial quest for self-knowledge. -- Jean Starobinski, professor emeritus of French literature, University of Geneva Lawrence D. Kritzman is centered on the way Montaigne's essays are self-contained expositions of ambivalence and unresolved tension about the difficulties of living, negotiating, and being in the world. He brings us back to archaic but vital issues that haunt us: to monsters and nightmares; to fear of impotence; to thoughts about the end of filial lines; to the ways that writing exhumes and thus copes with traumatic memories; to mimicry not as a way of representing the world but as a tactic of diverting, deflecting, and ultimately assuaging its violence. A strong and enduring contribution not only to early modern study but also to the importance of theory insofar as it can be displaced into and out of the works of canonical authors. -- Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University Kritzman, whose scholarship and erudition are apparent on every page, skillfully analyzes Montaigne's response to each of these traumas... Highly recommended. Choice Although other books will help modern readers understand Montaigne's place in the intellectual context of the sixteenth century, Kritzman's study achieves something rare in showing how Montaigne's imagination allowed him to confront the reality of his own everyday life. In this way, the Fabulous Imagination proves itself a historical text, but one that filters historical consciousness through a modern and personal prism. A unique mix of the personal, the historical, and the theoretical, the Fabulous Imagination brings Montaigne's Essays into focus as only a highly sensitive author with an extensive knowledge of both history and theory can. -- Michael Randall Substance Essential reading for any student or scholar of Montaigne's essays. Lawrence D. Kritzman... consistently balances a profound understanding of Montaigne's essays with a broad and diverse knowledge of postmodern theory, in the process offering illuminating readings of these texts. -- Kathleen Long The Comparatist The book offers a summary of the work of a major scholar of French Renaissance studies, and hence a showcase of the reading practices that marked the era in which this work first became prominent. -- Hassan Melehy H-France Kritzman's powerful insights lead us to understand the Essais in a new light, -- Elisabeth Hodges Sixteenth Century Journal

More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. He explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumas; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the anticipation of death. For Montaigne, imagination lies at the core of an internal universe influencing both the body and the mind. "The fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship. Tracing Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self, Lawrence D. Kritzman begins with his study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death, and Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion.