From tiny kidney stones to the hydraulic fountains of Italian gardens, from the fortification of castles against fire-powered war to the Heracletian flux of being that renders all attempts at security ultimately vain: An elemental interplay of stonelike fixity and watery fluidity composes the crux of Montaigne’s corpus from his objects of fascination to his ailing body to the still-ongoing, unfinished form of his thought. Focusing on accounts of travel, illness, fortification, diplomacy and home invasion in Montaigne’s writings, this talk brings forth the materialist duet of stone and flow and ponders its untimely eco-ethico-political significance. Rather than indulge in the fantasy of sovereign immunity, these texts promote a hospitality that risks everything to foster community or communication with others. The gesture could not be more precarious, or more contemporary.
Chad Córdova is assistant professor of Romance studies at Cornell University. His first book. Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life, was published in 2025 with Northwestern University Press. His writings on Montaigne have appeared in such venues as Exemplaria, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes and in the forthcoming new edition of the Cambridge Companion to Montaigne. He is now working on two books: one dealing with Descartes and environmental thought, and another, which this talk is from, that re-reads Montaigne in the context of recent discourses in theory and vice versa.