« Replis » Retour sur le lecteur des Essais

The ever more distinct “withdrawal” of the purpose of the Essais about himself, which corresponded to their opening to a wider readership in 1588 at the same time as to confessions more and more marked by the author of its solitude, is accompanied by the passage from the mimetic paradigm that describes self-portrait to a more hermeneutical paradigm, in which the intellectual operation of deciphering meaning and the ethical understanding that makes it possible must be combined.