ABSTRACT
The initial return to the 1980s, will be doubled by a further move, signalled by the quotation in the author's title: 'les enfantements de nostre esprit.' Teenager Marty McFly, having made his way, from the storm, the lightning and the machine-gun fire of a fateful November night in 1985, back to the past, propelled by the plutonium-powered DeLorean cobbled together by his friend the Doc. The encounter is a kind of dramatization avant la lettre of pre-historical thinking in action; it is also the reverse of the meeting which Montaigne imagines his text having, in some future afterlife, with Mme d'Estissac's son. 'De l'affection des peres aux enfans' is explicitly dedicated, from the outset, to a specific reader. Marty McFly, exiled to his own pre-history, pleads with the Doc first to open the door, then to listen, and finally to believe his — Marty's — story.
