Abstract

Offering a reading of the famous, yet strangely overlooked, "madman" scene in the early part of the First Meditation that is radicalized later in the dream and evil genius passages, this chapter sets out to thematize schizophrenic hyperbole and phenomenological elasticity as vital components of modern allegories of selfhood. Against the backdrop of Michel Foucault's read and his pointed debate with Derrida on the issue of the Cartesian "exclusion" of madness, which is, although instructive, rather reductively structuralized, the analysis highlights the aesthetical sharpness and fluidity rather than ideational "clarity and distinctiveness" of images of syncopated madness in Descartes; this further illustrates how the reflexively repressive, inherited views of Cartesian subjectivity end up discounting the reflexological potency of it. This chapter concludes by arguing that Meditations, composed with "a touch of madness," can be and is to be read rather as a comedy or a fable.

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