ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how Montaigne and Shakespeare negotiate and articulate an epistemology involving otherness. It explores in what ways these explorations are specifically epistemological. Treating literature as the site of intersection and interaction of multiple discourses rather than the creation or compilation of some version or other of a creative mind has gone a great distance in demonstrating the social importance of literature. Montaigne's statements against colonial violence are prompted by an ethic of forebearance with regard to the colonial other that is a direct consequence of the epistemology he develops in both Des coches and Des cannibales. He indicates that colonial violence is closely related to the colonial experience of not being able to know the other in plenary fashion. In Montaigne, the references to and discussions of Plato serve to indicate both the inadequacy of European knowledge to apprehend the Amerindians as well as the abuses of the intolerant French state.
