Reading Group

Theory Center Reading Group

Montaigne by Louis Jou, 1934.Like the Essays, our readings will be promiscuously curious, but we shall focus on two of Montaigne’s major concerns: the riddle of personal identity in its relation to the act of writing. As Montaigne gradually came to understand, both entailed the mediation of autruy, namely, us his readers, with whom he carries on an implicit dialogue. The result is an endlessly surprising work, now candid, now slyly ironical, which develops its ideas not logically but rhetorically, thanks to a prose that is by turns elliptical, metaphorical, satirical, erudite, insouciant, intimate, and paradoxical, but always vigorous.

The work of the weekly reading group culminates in symposium with distinguished scholars on Friday, April 3, 2026. Details to follow.

Graduate students may receive up to four credit-hours of CTIH-T700 (independent study) for work linked to the reading group. Before signing up, interested students should contact one of the conveners to agree on a work plan.

Reading Schedule

Conveners: Hall Bjørnstad (French & Italian) and Herbert Marks (Comparative Literature)

Text: The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958); ISBN: 978-0804704861 (pb). For those wishing to read the text in French, the three-volume edition by Pierre Villey (Presses Universitaires de France), available in paperback, is recommended, but other editions are fine too.

Starting January 23, 2026, the reading group meets Fridays, from 2 - 3:30, in Maxwell Hall 122, unless noted otherwise.

Friday, January 23
“On Repentance” [“Du repentir”] (III.3) (pages 610-621 in Frame). Also recommended: Frame’s introduction (pages v-xiv)

Remaining reading schedule to be announced.

The Reading Group constitutes the intellectual heart of the Center and predates the Center by many years. Here are some of the major texts the group has studied:

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.
Hans Blumenberg,The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
Stanley Cavell, The Claims of Reason.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
Michel De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Vol. 1.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I; Difference and Repetition.
Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World.
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time; Contriburtions to Philosophy (Of the Event).
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception; The Visible and the Invisible.
Plato, The Laws.
Jacques Rancière, The Names of History.
Eve K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis.
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf.

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