Jacques Derrida was indeed a contemporary intellectual who addressed the problems of the day by questioning established discourse and singular identities: the attack on Apartheid and support for the exemplarity of Nelson Mandela in South Africa; the continued use of capital punishment in the United States; the meaning of the word ‘Europe’ as the European Community began to take shape; the plight of undocumented immigrants, or the sans papiers, resulting from a new international diaspora and the failure of the nation-state to be unconditionally hospitable. Derrida debated these issues vociferously with his contemporaries, figures such as Jurgen Habermas, Hans-George Gadamer, and Richard Rorty.

To be contemporary, in the case of Derrida, suggests being modern or new. The ways in which he solicited, in the etymological sense of ‘shaking free,’ reified and inherited notions such as the idea of Europe and hospitality enabled him to see things from another place. For Derrida, the task of the intellectual is to respond to anti-egalitarian oppression, but to do so without resorting to simplistic answers and while continuing to press questions. His approach to intellectual engagement is more conducive to being able to apprehend the limits of reason. He opted for what Chantal Mouffe once characterized as an agonistic encounter that challenges Kantian universalism.

For Derrida, responsible political engagement cannot be programmed; it can only be achieved through theoretical speculation and the recognition of the aporetic and conflicting demands of a particular issue. In Specters of Marx, Derrida warns us about reductionism and normalization. ‘If it [a realistic history of political philosophy] did not try to read all the apparently contradictory possibilities, they [these sophisticated discourses] would dress up as “realism” at the very moment they fall short of the thing.’ Unlike a figure such as Sartre, whose political praxis could only be achieved through programmatic engagement and teleological commitment to the messianic, Derrida refused, from the start, an overdetermined political program based on a series of formulaic ideological presuppositions. Instead he opted for a confrontation with what he described as an ‘infinite demand,’ in the biblical sense of the expression, ‘signifying a justice that is not one’:

The Renaissance genre of the blason anatomique constructs an architecture of love derived from the morphology of the female body. This architecture of the body produces a poetics of detail: the construction is composed of fragmentary elements organized in enumerative groups. The image of the woman is represented by a series of part objects whose variety imposes an anatomically fragmented representation. In most cases the poet's encomium, ironic or not, is addressed to those parts of the body that are most noble according to Ficinian doctrine (eyes, ears, eyebrows), or to those considered most sensual within the satiric tradition (breasts, genitals, buttocks, thighs). The blasonneur's work is that of a homo faber, reducing the female body to strokes of the pen through the creation of a textual pointillism invoking precious metals as well as more prosaic objects. The text functions as a descriptive catalogue; it imitates, and indeed becomes, a construction, one that reveals, through its mass of words, the hand of a poet–architect. The blasonneur becomes the virtuoso of a corporeal rhetoric which translates the sublime joy of a writing project, producing a series of verbal monuments dedicated to becoming privileged loci of physical celebration.

In the blason anatomique the female body becomes consubstantial with the body of writing; the representation of the woman depicts that of the poet's imaginary projection of the reality of his desire onto an object that is narcissistically subjectivized.

Pro-logos: excess and the golden mean

By the time Rabelais was ready to compose the Quart Livre, the need to defend his book against the blasphemous attacks of his detractors became increasingly critical. Condemned by the Sorbonne after the appearance of the Tiers Livre in 1546, and subsequently censored by the Sorbonagre de Puy-Herbault in 1549 and Jean Calvin in 1550, Rabelais, victimized by the most extreme mechanisms of psychic and social repression, found it necessary to repress his wildest impulses and obey a law conceived in the name of the other. To be sure, the text is the obedient and servile offspring, the scriptural representation – that glorifies the edicts of paternal law while at the same time unconsciously trangressing it. Although Rabelais proposes moderation – the golden mean – as an ideal, his text puts this notion into question through an ever-surfacing fear of excess and uncontrollable appetite. In other words, moderation is posited as an ideal while in fact the text reveals its antithetical correlates. The rabelaisian novel must therefore be read as an artifact in which the text's unconscious counterplot reveals, through its language, that any knowledge of self or other remains purely elusive. The signs of the text are symptoms, never directly interpretable in themselves, but only in terms of an imaginary “sub-text” which lies within the symbolic order of language.

In Scève's world of love the use of the dream topos permits the elaboration of a fictive space where desire is played out. Within that locus the quest for Délie as supreme object of knowledge engenders a being whose reality cannot be separated from the very conditions under which that knowledge is produced. Délie becomes the point of reference of poetic invention, the desired object who overwhelms soul and sense and generates the possibilities of love within the framework of the dream. “Ma liberté lui a toute asseruie” (D. 6). The text depicts the poet's journey into an unknown world by representing the desiring mind's engagement in an aesthetically sublimated form of intersubjectivity that is essentially self-consuming. Against the figural backdrop of the mind's private “eye,” the subject enters into a relationship with the other, not as a real being, but rather as a mental object reflecting the anxieties of love. The dream narrative thus enacts a discursive fable that catalyzes the poet's energy towards the unthinkable, a domain to which he is drawn but from which he must ironically flee. Accordingly, this paradoxical situation is represented in the text by the specular relationship established between the desiring subject and the projection of an elusive feminine presence that gives substance to that desire and yet intermittently blocks its emergence. “Ie le vouluz, & ne l'osay vouloir” (D. 76).

Most, if not all, of Montaigne's critics of the essay “De l'institution des enfans” read that text quite literally as a statement of the essayist's pedagogical imperative. Undoubtedly Montaigne sets out to define an idealized education that challenges the exigencies of medieval scholasticism in the name of a pedagogy aiming at the formation of judgment and wisdom. But on another level Montaigne's text problematizes the figural birth of the ego. “Je ne vise icy qu'à découvrir moy-mesmes.” The allegorical instruction underlying Montaigne's essay demonstrates that his pedagogical theory transcends its exemplary status; it is a rhetoric that projects the desire of an ego struggling to establish its sense of mastery. Montaigne's pedagogical graffiti engender a rhetoric of conceit, a term which I use both in its etymological and secondary significations: conceptualization, taking hold of, and vanity. Indeed, the crucial epistemological challenge of how to know what we know includes within it a speculative response that portrays the writing process as a linguistic apprenticeship unveiling latent configurations of narcissism.

Montaigne's text transcribes unconscious fantasies through figures of the self within the rhetoric of the essay; like the text of the dream, the text of the essay is “articulated through secondary elaboration,” an activity that displaces “the scriptural process of representation to the representation of the scriptural process.”