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In one of his Cahiers, Paul Valéry has the note. Somatism (heresy of the end of time),Adoration, cult of the machine for living.† Have we come to the end of time? The heresy anticipated by Valéry has almost become the official religion. Everything is related to the body, as if it had just been rediscovered after being long forgotten; body image, body language, body consciousness, liberation of the body are the passwords. Historians, prey to the same infection, have begun inquiring into what previous cultures have done with the body, in way of tattooing, mutilation, celebration all the rituals related to the various bodily functions.2 Past writers from Rabelais to Flaubert are ransacked for evidence, and immediately it becomes apparent that we are far from being the first discoverers of bodily reality. That reality was the first knowledge to enter human understanding: ‘They knew that they were naked’ (Genesis 3.7). From then on, it has impossible to ignore the body.

Tradução do artigo “Peut-on définir l'Essai?”, de Jean Starobinski.Neste texto que se tornou referência nos estudos sobre a ensaística, Jean Starobinski reflete sobre a história do gênero e sobre as características mais notáveis desta forma moderna e fugidia, tendo como ponto de partida algumas linhas de força presentes na obra de Montaigne.

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This is how Montaigne explains the principles which he followed in his role as mayor, a statement whose very expression casts all the light needed on the nature of what has been called Montaigne's conservatism. In Montaigne's political language, to conserve is defined by its opposition to innovate. Conservation receives its lexical “value” from its contrasting relation with innovation and with “novelties.” This semantic pair, common in sixteenth-century French and in most European languages, is profoundly different from the present system. In today's language, the concept of conservatism (itself of recent formation) is defined principally in terms of the notion of progress or (because of the symmetry of the suffixes) of progressionism, in the sense which it had taken on during the 18th century, but the antonym innovation has not ceased contributing to the “value” of conservation. Today's semantic system cannot avoid attributing to “conservatism” an essentially antithetic function in reference to historic “progress,” or to theories of progress in which innovation is generally seen in a favorable light.

The day is one of the fundamental experiences of our natural existence. The obvious cycle of the sun, the alternation of sleep and being awake provide a link between the life of the body and the great regularity that assigns their successive moments to light and to darkness. Only a simplified abstraction allows us to consider time lived as an homogeneous flow. Our existence, in its proper substance and in its larger environment, is dominated by the rhythm of days and nights. Our very experience of the reality of objects is subject to it: the universe of things depends on the light of day that reveals it. It shrivels and becomes uncertain when night falls, with terror and dreams taking its place. The evidence that appears with the clarity of day is not of the same order as apparitions that arise from the depth of darkness.