I Think, I Am Mad. Derrida, Gaslight and the Irony of the Cogito

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.