My PhD thesis, now book-in-progress, entitled The Design of Montaigne’s “Essais”, analyses Montaigne’s writing in light of dessein—a slippery, semantically soluble term that at the tail end of the sixteenth century meant both a mental plan, aim, design, as well as a physical, material sketch, outline, or drawing. I was curious to see what happened if we read Montaigne through the lens of this term, given that he is a writer so carefully attuned to verbal play, and also wedded, at least initially, to a visual metaphor: that of painting.

In some ways, I read Montaigne ‘against the grain’, allowing the painting metaphor a centrality that has been undermined in recent scholarship, wondering what would happen if we let that word dessein define peinture not as fixed stately portrait but as a sketch or a disegno, with all the sixteenth-century connotations of that term. Like some postructuralist thinkers before me, including Derrida and Nancy, I am drawn to the pun, or perhaps zeugma, between dess-ein and dess-in, allowing it to shape my reading of the Essais and its authorial and textual designs.

I talk about the book, and my approach to Montaigne, in more detail here.