ABSTRACT
A discussion of Derrida’s critique of Descartes in ‘Cogito and the History of Madness,’ is inseparable from the context of its debate, the exchange between Derrida and Foucault. The fact that a critique of Descartes provides the groundwork for the elaboration of the debate between structuralism and post-structuralism (as represented by the respective positions of Foucault and Derrida), is by no means accidental. At issue is far more than the question of interpretation of the Cartesian text. Rather, the Cartesian text functions for both as the crucial site of articulation of a moment that qualifies the essential shape of modernity, a turning-point towards metaphysics and the emergence of history.1 If, for Foucault, Descartes’s exclusion of madness is instrumental in the foundation of reason, for Derrida, madness and dreams are merely stages for the introduction of hyperbolic doubt, which through its figurative function generates an excess that comes to define subjectivity in terms of a rational economy. Whereas for Foucault subjectivity is defined through a gesture of exclusion, the constitution of an exteriority, that founds through its muted silence the possibility of reason, for Derrida, reason is constituted obversely through the production of an excess whose totality
engenders the reflexive play of reason and its liminal definition as economy. Each of these interpretations of the Cartesian text presents a different scenario of the foundation of Cartesian subjectivity and its legacy to modernity. While, for Foucault, the origin of reason is grounded in the historical exclusion of madness, for Derrida on the contrary, reason is constructed through the totalizing gesture of hyperbolic doubt, whose inclusive character extends the boundaries of reason and redefines its character as a rational economy. At issue in both is the centrality of reason as an originary point whose strategic role determines concepts both of economy and of history, concepts that since Saussure have been seminal to the structuralist debate and the elaboration of a post-structuralist critique. Through a critical reading of Derrida’s interpretation of the Cartesian text and his debate with Foucault, this study hopes to provide a new understanding of the questions posed by the Cartesian text, as well as to determine the legacy of its heritage to structuralism and to its poststructuralist critique.
