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Queering the African American Essay

At the beginning of his essay “Of Experience,” Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay form, writes: “There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails us, we use experience.”1 This epigram perhaps best explains Montaigne’s own desire to forge the genre of the essay, whose name derives from the French verb meaning to make an attempt. Montaigne understood that knowledge, especially knowledge about the human being, however seemingly natural an object of human desire, is impossibly unstable, relative, illusory, and unsystematic. The best he could do was to make repeated efforts to stabilize knowledge by plumbing his own experience, and that of others, in brief spurts of intensely introspective and extroverted writing, allowing reason to take him as far as it could before it invariably failed, falling into anecdote, analogy, example, and incidence. As an embattled humanist, Montaigne was unsure to what extent any rational system could be fashioned to map humanity, even as he believed in generalizing ironically from the diverse experiences of particular situations and individuals.