Abstract

Following the narrative order and drive of the First Meditation, this stage of reading pushes that "touch of madness" further, and frame the "threefold" dream of Descartes, the progenitor of philosophical modernity of the West in terms of "a touch of imagination": Private, Theoretical and Theological. The task here is to articulate the autobiographical, narratological and surreal liminality between waking time and dreaming time as a twofold matrix of modernity; the analysis explores the material affectivity of Cartesian dream in terms of the Bachelardian thinking "matter" that dreams. Two points of contention are to be established, in view of the material performativity of Cartesian dream-reflection. First, the famous dream "argument" can be and is to be read as not simply as the illustrated defence of the epistemological zero-point but a poetics of risks; such an experience, along with the subsequent account, is integral to Descartes's philosophical project as a whole. Second, so is, by extension, the tactile metaphor of the Cartesian imagination and "hand-holding" guide to truth.

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