ABSTRACT
It is the good fortune of the reading of the Essais that commentaries on Des cannibales have reduced their emphasis on Montaigne's assimilation of the indigenous inhabitants of America to the Greco-Roman ancients. Montaigne presents a dream version of America, projecting a utopia that collapses on itself in the vagaries of his writing. This simulacrum allegorizes the limits of Western apprehension to grasp the radical alterity offered by the New World. Montaigne is examining the tenuousness of the entire Western project of empire by looking simultaneously toward either end of it, temporally and spatially. Everything Montaigne adds to his text to bring the Amerindians closer to full representation only stands in the way of apprehending them in their specificity. As the indigenous inhabitants of the America are brought into the European dream of expansion reduced to the European system of writing and subsumed in the translatio studiithat is one with translatio imperii.
