Publication details
„I Think, I Am Mad. Derrida, Gaslight and the Irony of the Cogito“, in: The Oxford Literary Review 36, S. 81-93.
ArticleAuthor(s): Setton, Dirk
Year of publication: 2014
Abstract: At the climax of George Cukor's Gaslight, a film melodrama from 1944, the female protagonist utters the phrase 'I am mad' which Stanley Cavell takes to reveal her Cogito. As such, the formula seems to be a perfect exemplification of Derrida's central point in Cogito and the History of Madness, namely that there is 'a value and a meaning of the Cogito', detectable in Descartes's Mediations, which welcomes madness as its genuine and necessary possibility. But how can we conceive of the 'I think'-the supreme principle of transcendental philosophy constituting the objectivity of cognition and experience-as embracing unreason as its own condition? This article attempts to highlight a quasi-transcendental interpretation of Derrida's answer to this question: deconstruction reveals a certain irony at the core of the primary text of transcendental philosophy. I argue that the formula 'I am mad' contains the decisive key to the argument: the irony of the Cogito consists in the fact of its double transcendental functioning-a transcendental function in the 'middle' form and a transcendental function in the active form.
Research area: Research Area 1: The Normativity of Normative Orders: Origins, Vanishing Points, PerformativitiyResearch project:
Subject(s): philosophyFurther information: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/olr.2014.0088
