Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity.

Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book’s series of clos...