ANCELL (Matthew), « Marrano Portraits: Montaigne and Derrida », Montaigne Studies An Interdisciplinary Forum, n°

35, 2023, Material Montaigne, p. 195-208

DOI : 10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-14722-0.p.0195

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 Marrano Portraits:
Montaigne and Derrida

Matthew Ancell

The sovereign is the one who is at the head, the chief, the
king, the capital, the first, the arkhē of commencement or
commandment, the prince, but also the once whose head
can spin, who can lose his head, in madness or decapita-
tion. And lose, along with his head, meaning.1

As a final example of fortune’s favor in the essay “Fortune is often met in

the path of reason,” Montaigne relates the account of Egnatii:

Ignatius Pere et fils, proscripts par les Triumvirs à Romme, se resolurent à ce

genereux office de rendre leurs vies entre les mains l’un de l’autre, et en
frustrer la cruauté des Tyrans: il se coururent sus, l’espée au poing ; elle en
dressa les pointes et en fit deux coups esgallement mortels, et donna à l’hon-
neur d’une si belle amitié qu’ils eussent justement la force de retirer encore
des playes leurs bras sanglants et armés, pour s’entrembrasser en cet estat
d’une si forte estrainte, que les bourreaux couperent ensemble leurs deux
testes, laissant les corps tousjours pris en ce noble neud, et les playes jointes,
humant amoureusement le sang et les restes de la vie l’une de l’autre (I, 35,
22).2

Montaigne pulls the account from Appian’s Civil Wars, by way of Claude de
Seyssel’s 1544 translation of the Greek.3 It was easy to find oneself at odds
––––––––––
1 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), p. 138.
2 Montaigne’s citations are from the Villey edition published by the Presses universi-

taires de France.
3Appian’s account is leaner, reading simply: Ἐγνάτιοι δέ, πατὴρ καὶ υἱός, συμφυέντες

ἀλλήλοις διὰ μιᾶς πληγῆς ἀπέθανον: καὶ αὐτῶν αἱ κεφαλαὶ μὲν ἀπετέτμηντο, τὰ δὲ λοιπὰ σώματα ἔτι
συνεπέπλεκτο. [The Egnatii, father and son, died with one blow while in the arms of each
other, and although their heads had been cut off, the rest of their bodies remained
intertwined]. Appian, Roman History V: The Civil Wars, Books 3-4, ed. and trans. Brian
McGing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 222-223.

Montaigne Studies, vol. XXXV (2023)

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196 Matthew Ancell

with someone in the civil war, especially in the midst of three factions of a
triarchic conflict. It is much more difficult – or fortunate, Montaigne claims –
to die as symmetrically as Egnatius and his son do here.
A 1947 English translation of the Essays, illustrated by Salvador Dalí,
places this drawing at the end of the essay (Fig. 1). Two vaguely expressive
heads cartoonishly seem to pop off the elongated necks of two superimposed
torsos. Discreet lines signify blood and/or motion of the severed heads. In the
background, four haloed figures, one with what appears to be a caduceus,
populate a barren landscape, reminiscent of Dalí’s The Temptation of St. Anthony
(1946) (Fig. 2). Five pages earlier, in “Of the education of children,” we find
another version of the story, this time in ink and watercolor (Fig. 3).4 Father
and son are locked in an embrace, as Montaigne recounts, joined at the torso,
where their sword wounds meet and drink “in each other’s blood and what
was left of each other’s life.” This time we only see the trace of one of the
heads, with the prophylactic helmet half-way out of the frame, while blood
ejaculates past each other from their decapitated bodies, which lean toward
each other. Separating them at the waist, a triangular pyramid, perhaps in
reference to the triumvirate, one of whom ordered the execution. The object
recalls the obelisk from The Temptation of St. Anthony, yet a proper obelisk is
monolithic with four sides, often tapering sharply in a pyramidal finial. In that
sense, this pyramid could represent a complete monolith or its detached
capital, but with only three sides. In any case, the phallic dimensions of the
objects are more than obvious. In the Roman context, obelisks were often
plundered from Egyptian conquests and then re-erected in Rome. Here, the
sharp point suggests the swords that joined them in mutual suicide, the execu-
tioner’s blade that separates them, and by metonymy, circumcision, a most
un-Roman practice.
The illustrated English edition, published by Doubleday & Company,
reprints Charles Cotton’s popular seventeenth-century translation,5 and forms
part of a corpus produced by Dalí during a nearly decade-long stint in the
United States after arriving with Gala in New York in August 1940. Fleeing
the war – and, in a sense, the elitist intellectual coterie of Europe – Dalí in-
stalled himself as a centerpiece in North American culture: film, fashion,
dance, print journalism, etc. He wrote a few books, including a novel, but
notably pivoted his efforts toward a popular audience, and prolifically
illustrated several books for Doubleday of his own selection from his bedside
reading, including Essays of Michel de Montaigne.6 Phillipe Desan notes that
Montaigne represents for Dalí both French culture and international humanist
thought in the post-war period.7 Christy Wampole argues that this illustrated

––––––––––
4 The edition contains twenty black and white illustrations, and sixteen in color.
5 Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans Charles Cotton, selected
and illustrated by Salvador Dali (Garden City & New York: Doubleday, 1947).
6 Richard Mas, “La aventura americana (1941-1948),” in Dalí: Una vida de libro – a

Life in Books, ed. Vicenç Altaió (Barcelona: Destino, 2004), p. 155.

7 Phillipe Desan, Bibliotheca Desaniana: Catalogue Montaigne (Paris: Classiques Garnier,

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Marrano Portraits: Montaigne and Derrida 197

edition demonstrates “the compatibility of Surrealism and essayism as

expressive, image-reliant forms.”8 Montaigne’s open, ambulatory style corre-
lates with Dalí’s visual free association, and in both cases the thinking subject
conjures images according to “the digressive logic of the essay and the
dream.”9 Wampole concludes that most of the color images in the text are
allegorical. When a color image is paired with a related image in black ink, as
we have here, a literal allegorical black ink image gives way to a veiled yet also
polyvalent picture that frees Dalí from mimetic constraints.10 These illustra-
tions seem to be interpretive, and not, as one critic asserts regarding Dalí’s
illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1969) that “Carroll’s text is
both an invitation to Dalí to enter a magical world and a pre-text for Dalí to
repeat, tirelessly, his own iconography.”11 Unshackled from representational
imperatives, Dalí’s illustrations in the Essays serve as an arena for exploration.
Supplemental to the text, the images conjure new associations, which impinge
on Montaigne and his work, in this case, with his reader and philosophical
descendent Jacques Derrida.
Neither of these images constitutes a literal portrait of Montaigne, which
Dalí included in the edition (Fig. 4),12 but rather cut into the body of the text
of the Essays – a book famously “consubstantial with its author” – much as
Montaigne’s own citations cut into his work. As Katie Chenoweth has noted,
the only breaks in the text were citations, serving “as the defining visual marks
in the Essays, so many scars revealing where the body of the essays has been
cut: verse cutting prose, Latin cutting French, other authors cutting
Montaigne […]. Once quotation intervenes, we can no longer pretend there is
“an integral body” when it comes to text, except as a phantasm promised or
deferred.”13 Such citations or double cuts, for Chenoweth, are constitutive of
textuality. She tracks how Derrida opened one of his sessions of the seminar
––––––––––
2006), p. 232. See also a brief comment by Réginald Dalle, “Montaigne vu par
Salvador Dalí,” in Montaigne et Les Essais, 1580-1980, ed. François Moureau, Robert
Granderoute and Claude Blum (Paris: H. Champion, 1983), p. 346. Dalí himself refers
to Montaigne as a friend: “Je vais dire comme mon ami Michel de Montaigne: il faut
toujours rendre tout ce qui est ultra-local universel et c’est pourquoi je finis toujours
mes discours en disant ‘Et maintenant vive la Gare de Perpignan et vive Figueras,’”
Daniel Abadie, ed., La vie publique de Salvador Dalí (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou
Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1980), p. 194.
8 Christy Wampole, “Dalí’s Montaigne: Essay Hybrids and Surrealist Practice,” in

Thomas Karshan and Kathryn Murphy, eds. (On Essays: Montaigne to the Present, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 323.
9 Ibid., p. 326-327.
10 Ibid., p. 331.
11 Elza Adamowicz, “The Surrealist Artist’s Book: Beyond the Page,” The Princeton
University Library Chronicle, vol. 70, n° 2, 2009, p. 284.
12 A second portrait, depicting Montaigne as a Hamletian figure regarding a skull

appears in the essay “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” p. 98.

13 Katie Chenoweth, “Derrida at Montaigne: A Stay of Execution,” in Deconstructing

the Death Penalty: Derrida’s Seminars and the New Abolitionism, Kelly Oliver and Stephanie
M. Straub, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), p. 101-18, here p. 103.

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198 Matthew Ancell

on the death penalty in 2000 with a quotation from the Essais: “‘To espouse,’
‘to espouse at the cost of his or her life’ [espouser au pris de la vie].”14 By not
giving the source of the quotation or its author, Derrida violently cuts from the
integral body of the text, emulating Montaigne’s practice, “taking a page from
Montaigne’s book in every sense” Chenoweth notes, in order to take us to
Montaigne (the place, the man, the text), un-cutting Montaigne by recontextu-
alizing his quotation and revealing its authorship.15 In demonstrating how
Derrida effects a “transubstantiation” of Montaigne’s corpus, troubling the
distinction between literal and figurative terms such as “member” or “life,”
Chenoweth also establishes a strong filiation between the two philosophers
centered on the practice of circumcision, or more specifically, the concept of
decircumcision. Such a term, se décirconcire, coined by Montaigne himself, fore-
grounds Montaigne as a philosophical father to Derrida, the two men joined
in cutting and sharing the same figurative blood, just as the Egnatii, the literal.
The passage from Montaigne is as follows:

Toute opinion est assez forte pour se faire espouser au pris de la vie. Le
premier article de ce beau serment que la Grece jura et maintint en la guerre
Medoise, ce fut que chacun changeroit plustost la mort à la vie, que les loix
Persiennes aux leurs. Combien void-on de monde, en la guerre des Turcs et
des Grecs, accepter plustost la mort tres-aspre que de se descirconcire pour se
babtiser? Exemple de quoy nulle sorte de religion n’est incapable (I, 14, 53).

As Chenoweth has noted:

The passage from circumcision to decircumcision is also a passage from the

literal to the figurative. This passage seems all too fitting, given that this very
division that marks (as Derrida noted more than once) a certain Judeo-
Christian difference and the attempted cancelling out – notably Paul in the
Epistle to the Romans – of Judaism in the passage from circumcision as
surgical event to a metaphorical and spiritualized “circumcision of the
heart.” Montaigne’s se décirconcire, “to decircumcize oneself,” is a hyperboli-
cally figurative term that exposes the double violence of conversion and this
Pauline negation. At the same time, the physically unrealizable “de-” flaunts
the indelible character of the cut and the impossibility of transcending the
letter or the body.16

Part of Derrida’s interest in Montaigne’s maternal Jewish ancestry and

familial conversion is his own Marrano (as he refers to it) lineage, and the
theme of circumcision runs throughout his work. He connects circumcision

––––––––––
14 I cite the English here to replicate Derrida’s practice when lecturing in English.
That is, at least as I observed it, to cite in translation, then repeat in the original.
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2014), p. 270. See also, Sophie Jama, L’Histoire juive de Montaigne (Paris:
Flammarion, 2001), p. 58.
15 Chenoweth, art. cit., p. 104.
16 Ibid., p. 112.

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Marrano Portraits: Montaigne and Derrida 199

and the Eucharist by examining the Orthodox Jewish rite in which the mohel
draws blood from the wound of circumcised child with his mouth, mixing
wine and blood in, as he calls it, “cette cène incroyable.”17 Derrida’s fascina-
tion with circumcision and de-circumcision should not be detailed here, but
his own biographical and philosophical treatment gives insight into the opera-
tions of conversion, with the notion, as John Caputo describes, of “a break
that cannot be made cleanly, in virtue of what he elsewhere called the impos-
sibility of the pure cut.”18 The movement into the Law of Grace through
baptism and the Eucharist, leaves a remainder behind. The blood sacrifices of
the Ancient Law are transformed, but Christianity is tied to them. To be de-
circumcised is not to be uncircumcised, nor is it necessarily the metaphorical
circumcision of the heart. Rather, it is the bond that binds to what has been
cut, the ligature of belonging still to a place where he does not belong, and
thus speaks to the predicament of Jews already in diaspora then threatened
with expulsion.
The link between Montaigne and Derrida has been underexamined, with
a few notable exceptions. In Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif, Hélène
Cixous makes explicit the connection between the two philosophers,
attempting to paint Derrida “wholly naked” as the preface to the reader in the
Essais declares. Both philosophers employ a style that attempts to excise itself
from the strict limits of linear logic, circumscribing with biographical and
corporeal specificity the universality of the Enlightenment. Such philosophical
“naked” portraits, in particular Derrida’s “Circonfession” and Mémoires
d’aveugle, reveal an affinity best figured by circumcision, which encompasses
notions germane to both men, as well as Cixous: translation, conversion,
identity, epistemology, and in particular, the portrait.
Montaigne’s possible maternal Jewish heritage does not at first seem an
integral part of his work. As is well-known, Montaigne’s mother Antoinette de
Louppes (Lopez), daughter of Pierre de Louppes, might have descended from
new Christians or (as they were known pejoratively) marranos (or marranes),
forced converts and sometimes crypto-Jews, expulsed from the Iberian Penin-
sula. The family settled London, Antwerp, and southern France. As Phillipe
Desan chronicles, Antoinette’s uncle, or perhaps her godfather, Antoine de
Louppes de Villeneuve, was a wealthy Spanish merchant in Bordeaux who,
having married off his own daughters for social advancement, had similar
plans for his brother’s daughter with Pierre Eqyuem. While the source of
much speculation, Michel’s notable silence on his mother’s origin, Desan
argues, is almost certainly a function of his fixation on asserting his own
nobility. That is, it was a matter of class and not religion that concerned him.
Desan is cautious on the point of Jewish ancestry in general, revising a stance
in one essay that it was “most likely” the Louppes family descended from new
––––––––––
17 Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions du

Seuil, 1991), p. 145-146.

18 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 283.

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200 Matthew Ancell

Christians to, in his recent biography Montaigne, they “may have” done so.19
Other scholars are more confident, for example Donald Frame and Géralde
Nakam.20 Sophie Jama, in particular, makes a case for Montaigne’s Jewish
lineage in which his cognizance of the ‘fact’ of his Jewish ancestry has the
effect of him saying only what he could say and write in constructing his self-
portrait, creating a certain vigilance that heightened his critical awareness:

La claire conscience d’une identité intérieure étouffée, ajoutée à sa certitude

de l’unité de l’homme […] entraîna chez lui la volonté de lutter contre tous
les préjugés absurdes visant à hiérarchiser le fait humain. En désirant se
mettre à nu, en tâchant de dévoiler tous les replis de ses pensées et tous les
actes de sa vie quotidienne, il tournait en ridicule les monstrueuses mises à
l’écart opérées par les adeptes de quelque “pureté de sang”.21

Such a condition, she posits, “sa conversation avec l’autre absent,” certainly
produced in him a psychic tear.22
Without going so far as Jama, I will proceed as if the hypothesis of
Montaigne’s new Christian ancestry were true, although it does not need to
be, as this essay concerns philosophical bloodlines, not genetic ones. In any
case, Derrida (as well as Cixous) assumes the connection of forced conversion:
“Montaigne, whose wily and enigmatic hand-to-hand combat with Christian-
ity, or even with the Marrano Judaism that haunted his filiation on the side of
his mother, would deserve more than one seminar, Montaigne, who died a
Christian death in his bed in his fifties.”23 It is also not necessary to infer any
kind of Midrashic practice in the Essais. Undeniably, though, Montaigne
brings the term decircumcision to the fore, and not speaking of what he does
not know or denying his potential Jewishness (even if it is for reasons of social
advancement), enacts the very meaning of figurative decircumcision.
The theme of literal circumcision appears in Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage
in the account of Rome on January 30, 1581, as he witnesses “la plus ancienne
ceremonie de religion qui soit parmy les hommes, et la considera fort atten-
tivement et avec grand commodité: c’est la circoncision des Juifs.”24 After
recording in some detail the rite, he concludes that it “Il semble qu’il y ait
beaucoup d’effort en cela et de douleur ; toutefois ils n’y treuvent nul dangier,
et en est tousjours la playe guerie en quatre ou cinq jours.”25 In the midst of
––––––––––
19 Phillipe Desan, “From Eyquem to Montaigne,” in Philippe Desan, ed., The Oxford

Handbook of Montaigne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 22-23; Phillipe

Desan, Montaigne. A Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2017), p. 13-14.
20 Phillipe Desan, ed. Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: H. Champion, 2004),

p. 541-542. Géralde Nakam, Le dernier Montaigne (Paris: H. Champion, 2002), p. 85-113.

21 Jama, op. cit., p. 152-153.
22 Ibid., p. 153.
23 Derrida, The Death Penalty, op. cit., p. 276.
24 François Rigolot, ed., Journal de Voyage de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Presses

universitaires de France, 1992), p. 101-102.

25 Ibid., p. 103.

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Marrano Portraits: Montaigne and Derrida 201

quoting Montaigne’s description of the event after the foreskin has been
removed but before the wound is attended to, Cixous cuts into the text and
inserts the following: “Le 31 Janvier il [Montaigne] eut la colique et fit une
pierre assez grossette. À ce moment-là (du récit) notre Jacques Derrida éprou-
ve une violente sympathie au niveau du bas ventre.”26 In her circumscribing of
the two philosophers with the circumcised child, Cixous seems to have altered
the date of passing the stone, from January 28 to the 31st, as indicated in the
Journal, although he passes more on February 8 and 12. Indeed the text is
intercut throughout with the passing of stones. This sympathetic pain below
the belt, real or imagined by Cixous, binds Derrida and Montaigne together.
In Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif, Cixous plays upon Derrida’s
own partial self-identification with St. Augustine in his autobiographical text,
“Circonfession” (1991). The essay is the second half, or more properly bottom
half, of a book titled Jacques Derrida, as if it were a biography or monograph of
the philosopher. It is both and neither, as it “suppose un contrat” between
Geoffrey Bennington, the co-author and translator, and Derrida, in which
Bennington, in an essay called “Derridabase,” set out to describe, if not the
totality of Derrida’s thought, then at least its general system in as clear a
manner as possible, as if writing a computer program “accessible à n’importe
quel usager.”27 This is something any reader of Derrida would welcome, but
“Comme l’enjeu du travail de [Jacques Derrida] est de montrer en quoi un tel
système doit rester essentiellement ouvert, cette entreprise était d’avance
vouée à l’échec.”28 In the attempt, Bennington actually accomplishes a
remarkably lucid accounting of Derrida’s thought. The failure, however, was
programmed by Derrida’s essay, printed underneath Bennington’s, on the
bottom third of each page. Here’s a clip:

Montaigne le disait, “je me désavoue sans cesse,” il est impossible de suivre

ma trace, comme celle du sida, jamais je n’écris ou produis autre chose que
cette destinerrance du désir, les trajets inassignables et les sujets introuvables
mais aussi le seul signe d’amour, celui qu’on gage à ce pari (plutôt le sida que
te perdre) et vous essayez de calculer l’itinéraire de textes qui n’explosent pas
tout de suite, n’étant en somme que de mèche, vous voyez par intermittence
courir la flamme sans savoir où ni quand l’explosion, d’où la transe, l’an-
goisse et le désir, l’impatience précipitée du lecteur, vite qu’on en finisse, I
beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire and he was
consumed and arose as Elijah.29

It is hard to know when to stop quoting “Circonfession,” since full stops in

punctuation are rare, with the prose flowing freely as if blood cut from the
––––––––––
26 Hélène Cixous. Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif (Paris: Galilée, 2001),
p. 65.
27 Bennington and Derrida, p. 3.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 186. The quotation in italics is from William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and

Hell, “A Memorable Fancy V.” See William Blake, The Complete Poetry & Prose of William
Blake, David V. Erdman, ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 43.

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202 Matthew Ancell

circumcision of phallologocentric text above it. Whereas “Derridabase” never

cites Derrida directly, insisting on systemization of a philosophical corpus,
“Circonfession” continually undercuts such abstraction and coherence with
not just merely anecdotal autobiographical streams of thought, but with a
forceful dissemination of intensely personal recollections, a confessional
specificity, and even vivid descriptions (at least for a philosophical text) of
Derrida’s literal corpus, that is, his own circumcised penis. This exercise all
takes place under a perforated line, separating it from the linear exposition
above, and suggesting kind of potential “detachability,” for “In shrunken
typeface,” the essay signifies the covenant between the book’s collaborators.30
One sympathy between Derrida and Montaigne is in their disavowal of
the self. If the self presented in “Derridabase” aspires to the truth of Derrida,
in a style devoid of quotations, we see that Derrida’s abstruse style performs
the self, intercut with citations of Montaigne, St. Augustine, William Blake (as
in the quotation above), et al. These citations are virtually the only breaks,
save for numbered sections, fifty-nine total, corresponding to the years of
Derrida’s life at the time of publication. Mimicking Montaigne, the Saint
Juif/sainjuif, Derrida apes and converts him, as Cixous does to him in turn.
Texts and citations flow freely among these three authors. As Frédéric Regard
has argued “we must keep in view this general principle of the intimate
functioning of the writing of the Portrait: style as blood transfusion in two
senses, style as trans-fusion of meaning. This definition of style serves as a
response to the question of intimacy ‘in deconstruction’: we might say that
there is no greater intimacy in deconstruction than style, with style the true
blood-line between the texts.”31 It is clear Derrida read and cited Montaigne,
but Cixous’s ligature of Montaigne and Derrida through their peri-abdominal
wounds suggests a recursive interpretational relationship and not just a matter
of style (as they are different), but rather something akin to a transfusion of
meaning. Montaigne and his tangential, citational, and ambulatory prose, and
Derrida with his allusive and palimsestic reading practices, inhabit a non-
linear mode of interpretation.
While Derrida never really ceases to write about circumcision, Montaigne
never writes about his own, even if it was only figurative. Let us remember
that it is none other than Montaigne who coins the term “decircumcision” as a
figure for conversion, usually forced. As Chenoweth observes:

the writer has additionally broken the line of his paternal name with a single
strike-through in the family book, re-naming his father and himself. The
name Montaigne signals, then, not only the place Montaigne, but more precisely
it names the place of this double cutting of filiation—including a cutting-off
which has, presumably, kept Montaigne himself from being circumcised.
Where circumcision has been foreclosed, under the name of Montaigne, the
writer cuts and cites in order to open his ear to the word or wound of the
––––––––––
30 Simon Morgan Worham, The Derrida Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 24.
31 Frédéric Regard, “Derrida Un-Cut: Cixous’s Art of Hearts,” Paragraph, vol. 30, n°
2, 2007, p. 15.

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Marrano Portraits: Montaigne and Derrida 203

other.32

This foreclosure of circumcision, this covering up of the truth of his ancestry,

is also the wound through which Montaigne and Derrida “hear” each other.
Returning to the Dalí image, perhaps we can see literary father and son, in
their embrace of citation and affirmation of the cut that binds their philosophi-
cal corpuses together. Perhaps we can see them as consubstantial, not just in
their “Marrano” heritage, but as philosophers who mount a critique of mono-
lithic reason.
Let us juxtapose the image of the Egnatii with that of the pre-surrealist
Giorgio de Chirico, The Great Metaphysician, (1917) (Fig. 5). One of the artist’s
late mannequin works, various geometrical components are pieced together to
form a tower, capped with a signature mannequin-like bust. Occupying the
foreground, a hieratic position, the metaphysician casts a shadow that extends
to the left near a structure fenestrated with arches, which somehow also
appears – incongruently with the other buildings and the apparent position of
the sun – in shadow, while the tower is flanked on the right by pillars of an
ostensibly classical structure. A solitary human figure (a philosopher? The
Cogito?) stands deep in the background, casting a shadow toward structures
resting on the horizon. The construction of the tower is haphazard, if not
precarious. A bricolage of impossibly-fitting shapes (including a rectangular
object incised with what seems to be a cross) cluster together and occlude the
vanishing point and its implications of infinitude.33 Indeed, as with other
works in de Chirico’s “metaphysical” paintings, the perspectival system itself,
is out of joint, and its pretension to verisimilitude and truth is suspect. The
isomorphism of the Albertian window used in constructing perspectival art
and the gridded Cartesian plane has resulted in a conflation of artificial
perspective as a figure for Enlightenment rationalism. While anachronistic, the
equation spawned a “vigorous privileging of vision” and “a grip of modern
ocularcentrism,” according to Martin Jay.34 The Great Metaphysician stands erect
as a parody, not only of perspective, but also cartesian rationalism.
John Caputo finds in Derrida’s deconstruction evidence of the philoso-
pher’s unique religion, a personal faith caught between Judaism and Christi-
anity (yet neither) and aimed at the secret nature of truth, that is, our
severance from truth, at least as understood in the metaphysical and Enlight-
enment senses:

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32 Katie Chenoweth, “Cutting and Uncutting: A String Theory of Survival, from
Derrida to Montaigne,” manuscript in the author’s possession.
33 Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 244.
34 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 69 (see p. 69-82). Jay also notes that
“Montaigne’s essays […] display an awareness of the implications of finite, localized
perspective,” thus critically anticipating detranscendentalizing interpretations of pers-
pective, ibid., p. 189.

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204 Matthew Ancell

What Derrida calls “my religion,” his passion, his prayers and tears, circles
around this cut, the one that severs him from the healing consolations of
either a metaphysical or a religious Truth, capitalized, the healing balms of
any determinable faith and Truth, whose advantage is to hold everything
steadily in place. He confesses, if not “sin-fulness,” then sans-fulness, the deep
divide within his being, within our being, the cut that severs us from the
Truth of truth, severing the head of Saint Prépuce, cutting phallic Truth down
to size.35

The nakedness and completeness of Montaigne’s portrait is promissory and

contrary to fact: “Que si j’eusse esté entre ces nations […] je m’y fusse tres-
volontiers peint tout entier, et tout nud” (“Au lecteur”). As it is, we find in it a
pact with Derrida, with both philosophers on the margins of the Enlighten-
ment, touching, circumscribing, interrogating, and severing themselves from
it, even as that separation is never complete, joined, as we all are, for better
and for worse, to its towering influence. Montaigne’s response is proleptic,
coming before the Cartesian self, guarding against its certainties.
The cut and alliance of circumcision, then, marks and joins both French-
men. If Montaigne covers up his mother’s lineage, infibulating truth if you
will, he keeps his promise not to portray himself naked, yet his philosophical
paternity of Derrida reopens the wound. Derrida cannot stop talking about
the religion of his mother, cannot stop following her remains, as he says
“l’incapacité où je demeure de répondre de mon nom, de le rendre même à
ma mère, reste que je suis ici.”36 Cixous signals the bodily sense of “remains”
by writing in the margins of his text an anagrammatic reference to his mother,
Ester “reste d’Ester.”37
The allusions, puns, and tropes spill out endlessly, and I have not done
justice to Montaigne, but I will simply return to the conceit of his Essays as a
consubstantial portrait as part of Montaigne’s body that is both part of him
and yet separate, what remains, so to speak. While his self, the truth, and his
lineage are occluded in his conversion or de-circumcision, his cutting off from
the absolutism of the age joins his body in extra-rational filiation with figures
on the other side of Descartes, such as Derrida, who circles back to
Montaigne38.
Brigham Young University

––––––––––
35 Caputo, p. 284.
36 Bennington and Derrida, op. cit., p. 51.
37 Cixous, op. cit., p. 17; Regard, art. cit., p. 12.
38 I would like to thank Lavender Earnest for her invaluable assistance with this

essay.

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Marrano Portraits: Montaigne and Derrida 205

Fig. 1: Essays of Michel de Montaigne, black and white, p. 62.

Fig. 2: Salvador Dali, The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946).

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206 Matthew Ancell

Fig. 3: Essays of Michel de Montaigne, color, insert between p. 62 and p. 63.

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Marrano Portraits: Montaigne and Derrida 207

Fig. 4: Essays of Michel de Montaigne, frontispiece, color.

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208 Matthew Ancell

Fig. 5: Giorgio de Chirico, The Great Metaphysician (1917).

© 2023. Classiques Garnier. Reproduction et diffusion interdites.