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In tracing the history of emotions and of mentalities, one is immediately confronted with a question of method resulting from the interplay of emotions and language.The emotions whose history we wish to retrace are accessible to us only from the time when they find expression, verbally or by other means. For the critic, for the historian, an emotion exists only beyond the point at which it attains a linguistic status. No facet of an emotion can be traced before it is named, before it is designated and expressed. It is not, then, the emotion itself which comes before us; only that part which has passed into a given form of expression can be of interest to the historian.

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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.

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.