Montaigne's ‘De la diversion’ (3.4) dramatises and exemplifies the manner in which the human subject turns itself away from the anxiety produced by the fear of death. The essential question underlying this essay is how to talk about death or rather how to avoid it. If diversion is an issue in this text, it is ultimately the result of the essayist's inability to become consubstantial with the object of the writing act itself: death. ‘Nous pensons toujours ailleurs’ (p. 834) (‘Our thoughts are always elsewhere’, p. 939), proclaims the essayist. According to Montaigne's own formulation, the human subject is always already the victim of the radical discontinuity of the self; the kinetic energy generated by the mind renders it other to itself by displacing the subject from the locus where in principle it should be. As the essayist puts it in ‘Du repentir’(3.2), depicting the writing of the essays: ‘C'est un contrerolle de divers et muables accidens et d'imaginations irresoluës et, quand il y eschet, contraires: soit que je sois autre moy-mesme, soit que je saisisse les subjects par autres circonstances et considerations’ (p. 805). (‘This is a register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when need be, contradictory, either because I myself have become different or because I grasp hold of different attributes or aspects of my subjects’, p. 908).

Montaigne's ‘De la diversion’ enacts the scene that his essay depicts, the vain movement of diversion, by mirroring the theoretical strategy that is the subject of his writing. By essaying the idea of diversion through a variety of examples of the mind's remarkable ability to redirect its own thoughts, the text becomes the symptom of the very malady that it claims to diagnose: displacement and diversion. In essence, the performance of the essay becomes the object that it designates by becoming the example of that which it writes. Through the displacement of the subject of diversion, the writerly subject displaces itself in a series of fragments that emblematises the subject's failure to become whole.