DE L’ART DE GUÉRIR À L’ART DE RIRE: FACÉTIES CYNIQUES ET THÉRAPIE ÉPICURIENNE DANS LES ESSAIS
FROM THE ART OF HEALING TO THE ART OF LAUGHING: CYNICAL ANTICIES AND EPICUREAN THERAPY IN THE TRIALS

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the discreet presence of the topos of therapeutic laughter in the Essays even though Montaigne resorts to facetiousness as an anti-therapy and a striking and salutary philosophical exercise. Montaigne not only multiplies facetious outbursts against doctors and medicine (II, 37), he also insinuates a form of cynical self-medication and develops forms of joyful prophylaxis, replacing an illusory art of healing with a playful pedagogy of knowledge, teaching us how to live and die, which he implements in the therapeutic fiction of diversion (III, 4) and in the paradoxical praise of gravel (III, 13). Do these paradoxical therapeutic games not address an issue of philosophical purging of errors of judgment, and therefore reveal subversive implications, from cynical demystification to Epicurean pharmacopoeia?

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