Life in the Grotto: Montaigne & the Meaning of Posthumanism

Abstract

This article delineates two principles of the grotesque in Renaissance visual art, texts, and garden grottoes, one more superficial and one more radical. In sixteenth-century Europe, the latter mode finds its most striking manifestation in the Essays (1580–95) of Michel de Montaigne. The Essays offer a paradigm for grotesque thinking, one that crucially inflects contemporary ideas on the potentialities, and aporias, of posthumanist theory, life, and ethics. Grotesque ornaments, garden grottoes, and the essay à la Montaigne are here reread as provocative object lessons for bringing into focus the difference between a superficial and a constitutive posthumanism still to come.

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