The Interstitial Place of the Cannibal: Cruelty, Habit and Writing in Montaigne

Abstract

After presenting the necessity of modern philosophy of thinking the enigmatic image of the Latin American savage in the context of the construction of an exotic imaginary of Latin America, we expose the philosophy of Montaigne about costumes as a mediation that differentiates people as well as cultures. From this point of view, Montaigne thinks the diversity of the world, which he must defend to build an image of boundaries against the violence of European civil war, taking distance from the colonialist discourse in the defense of Pre-Hispanic life in Latin America. However, Montaigne criticizes the existence of cruelty in both worlds, showing a coming artificial cosmopolitism in his writing, as an analogy of the formlessness of humanity built from the endless variety.