Hume said that "reason is the slave of the passions." Pascal Quignard goes further: reason is born wounded, it stammers, it bleeds. In *Reason*, the last great Roman orator, Marcus Porcius Latron, embodies an intelligence that doesn't argue, but rather remembers, stammers, hunts.

With prose that is both music and exaltation, he dismantles classical reason to find, between childhood and exile, its dark and visceral core. Beautifully translated by Audomaro Hidalgo, this work descends into the realm before language, where thinking is also trembling.