Enunciation and Sentient Body: Poetics of the Word in Michel de Montaigne

Abstract

The relationship between discourse in act and the sentient body leads us to consider an enunciative phenomenology. With the purpose of possessing the semiotic conditions, we propose, in the first place, to develop a hypothesis of a tensive analysis of enunciation. This approach allows us to show that the sentient parameter crosses the personal, interpersonal and impersonal components of the discourse in act, while it continues to assure its coexistence and its link. The hypothesis is then developed and proved in the concrete analysis of enunciation in Montaigne.

One of its essential characteristics is precisely that of articulating enunciative indistinction, that emphasizes the co-enunciation originated in the praxis as our condition of fact, with the enunciative encarnation, where the particular word and the sentient body interact. The analysis of the argumentative treatment of urinary lithiasis, which Montaigne suffered from, illustrates this last aspect and tries to reactivate the enunciative wager of prosopopoeia. The same efficiency of discourse on somatic sensitivity leads us at the same time to propose the demand for the sensitization of the word, or rather, of poeticity.