ABSTRACT
A striking feature of the advance of liberal political and epistemological theory and practice over the past three hundred years has been the increase in the ranks of the politically and epistemically enfranchised. Paranoia, for Sigmund Freud, starts with the repression of: a homosexual wishful fantasy— that is, for a man, sexual desire for another man. In paranoia the decathexis spreads from its original object to the external world as a whole, and the detached libido attaches itself to the ego, resulting in megalomania. This chapter examines the influence of Rene Descartes's writings, works of intentionally democratic epistemology that explicitly include women in the scope of those they enfranchise. Descartes's explicit intent was the epistemic authorization of individuals as such—not as occupiers of particular social locations, including the social location of gender. The chapter argues that the structures of characteristically modern epistemic authority normalized strategies of self-constitution drawn from Cartesian Method.
