More urgently than ever, perhaps, it is to the essay we should turn, in an attempt to engage critically and inventively with what is happening, with the question of writing and literature now. Despite the remonstrances and pontifications of a certain academic journalism, the ‘essay in literary criticism’ has been extinct for several decades. As Sarah Wood observes, in a commentary on Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference (1967): ‘Criticism must learn to be writing and not the contemplation of writing as form.’ And the same is true of the ‘theoretical essay’. We need to let ourselves be traversed, as ever, by the energies of Montaigne, by his astonishing practice of ‘scattering … a word here, a word there, examples ripped from their contexts, unusual ones, with no plan and no promises’, by his veering perspectives on a given topic guided by the inclination ‘to catch it from some unusual angle’.

We need to keep discovering and learning from the extraordinary essays of Theodor Adorno, the title of whose ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958) may mislead. In truth it scatters like Montaigne, affirming the value of the genre of the essay as writing that goes off, as a work of ‘discontinuity’ (16) and ‘mobility’ (20).