評Rivi Handler-Spitz, Symptoms of an Unruly Age: Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity

Li Zhi 李贄 (1527-1602) was an icon and iconoclast of the late Ming. An exceptional figure by any measure, he has come to represent his times. Rivi Handler-Spitz' new study manages to preserve such paradoxes as it explores them, thanks in no small part to the helpful perspective offered by the comparandum of early modern Europe, particularly-but not exclusively- Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and his Essays. Without positing a direct causal mechanism, she finds in both writers, and many of their contemporaries, similarly, if differently, manifested attitudes toward representation and its interpretation. In both literature and socio-economic life, the tokens of meaning and value-words, coins, clothing, and more-floated away from where people expect them to be fixed. Writers like Li Zhi and Montaigne, attuned to these changes, did more than express these anxieties: they translated them into ways of reading and writing. Handler-Spitz calls the attitude that runs through many of these writers' work “bluff,” a rhetorical stance that presents less an assertion of truth than a problematic, even confrontational position.