ABSTRACT
With all their twists and turns, Don Quixote's adventures form the boundary: they mark the end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs and contain the beginnings of new relations. In the sixteenth century, resemblance was linked to a system of signs; and it was the interpretation of those signs that opened up the field of concrete knowledge. The project of a science of order, with a foundation such as it had in the seventeenth century, carried the implication that it had to be paralleled by an accompanying genesis of consciousness, as indeed it was, effectively and uninterruptedly, from Locke to the 'Ideologues'. When dealing with the ordering of simple natures, one has recourse to a mathesis, of which the universal method is algebra. Don Quixote reads the world in order to prove his books. The limit of knowledge would be the perfect transparency of representations to the signs by which they are ordered.
