ABSTRACT
Montaigne’s Essays are more than just a spiritual and physical autobiography. In examining the text, we discover Montaigne’s body in the process of expressing itself, as if the work of writing accompanied the elaboration of the body itself: a speaking body, a suffering body. In many ways, a linear and critical reading of the Essays reveals a body under construction, between skepticism and classical humanism, between Baroque melancholy and self-assertion. But perhaps the outcome is a failure, for in truth the only thing that counts is the real, living body, the one that so often resists thought.
