Presence and Absence of Montaigne in Foucault’s Work

Abstract

Despite the fact that there is not a deep study of Montaigne’s Essays in Foucault’s works, based on the few mentions that he makes to his thought it is possible to reconstruct his reading. If Descartes is the author who, through a violent gesture, expels the madness from the reasonable and closes the tradition of exercise of the self reactivated in the Renaissance, in Montaigne the essay emerges as a technology of constant self-transformation exercised by a subject who, faced with the impotence of evidence to access the truth, can only subject himself to test. The relationship established between the two authors within the framework of Foucaultian philosophy allows to glimpse how the axe of subjectivity is connected with the axes of power and knowledge, as well as to underline the importance of a philosophical study of the Essays in order to understand the genealogy of the ontology of the present.