Bielik-Robson, Agata
Senior Fellow: April-June 2024
Research Project: First of All, Survival: Michel de Montaigne’s Existential Scepticism
The focus of my project will be Michel de Montaigne and his peculiar form of sceptical reasoning which I want to call existential scepticism. Michel de Montaigne does not belong to the well-established canon of modern Jewish thinkers: it is only recently that the scholars began to pay attention to the Marrano background of his thought. My project wants to analyse the possible connection between Montaigne’s Marranism and the existential type of scepticism which permeates his writings. My thesis is that the Marrano choice of ordinary survival over the “glorious death” of kiddush ha-Shem, explicitly affirmed by Montaigne in his “Essays,” favours a sceptical attitude towards the “tradition of the sublime.” When deeply reflected, as in the case of the author of the “Essays,” the choice of life as daily unheroic “survie” – the Marrano version of the biblical u’baharta ba’hayim – lends a critical view of the tradition (not only religious, also philosophical) conceived in sacrificial and martyrological terms as a body of beliefs that require of their followers to lay their lives at the altar of the higher truth.
Agata Bielik-Robson is professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham.