Off the Human Track : Montaigne, Deleuze, and the Materialization of Philosophy

Abstract

Responding to long-standing criticisms that theoretical readings of early modern literary texts are anachronistic, Melehy argues that past and present phenomena may be understood alongside one another, while still respecting both of them. He brings together Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Montaigne through their shared interest in Lucretius. Melehy demonstrates a Lucretian-inflected materialism in Montaigne’s Essais that implicitly criticizes Platonic conceptions of the primacy of thought over matter, and concomitant human claims to dominate the physical and natural world. Melehy signals intersections between Montaigne’s dissident philosophy and Deleuze’s materialist re-conception of the history of philosophy in order to point out ways that the essayist’s work speaks to questions that are also pertinent to present-day meditations on the environment.