Cardozo Law Review
Abstract
Thus Jacques Derrida begins his essay on the social sciences with a quote from Montaigne to the effect that we need to interpret interpretations more than we need to interpret things. In his own time, Montaigne could have been especially sensitive to such a deciphering since the definitions of truth were being challenged through philosophic/theological mediations. Rather than war and fratricidal conflicts in a country torn by religious wars, Montaigne proposed a culturally relativist reading of history, thereby recasting the concept of the "outsider" as well as the nature of the language within which these observations were to be made. Montaigne's Essays attest to the first effort to make judgment relative rather than absolute, thereby introducing a genre which would no longer accommodate Roman rhetorical structures as in the discourse, for example, or the polemical/demagogic philippics, but would lay claim to a new scriptural territory where the individual's proposals would find their place.
Disciplines
Law
Recommended Citation
Serge Gavronsky,
Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature,
15
Cardozo L. Rev.
1127
(1994).
Available at:
https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol15/iss4/11