The Renaissance Cogito, or On the Cruelty of the Object

Abstract

The basic task of the paper is to show that – through its artistic threating of madness and folly – the North European Renaissance developed an entirely new type of certainty, which can be associated with neither ontological argument nor empirical knowledge. On the basis of two examples, the paper develops the argument that this new type of certainty rests solely on an entirely conceptual innovation, defined within the paper as the “Renaissance paradoxical absolute”, and which is generally expressible (and within the paper further elaborated) in terms of the following seemingly contradictory rule: every possible negation of X is either a form or a level of X itself. The thesis of the paper is that this new type of certainty already involves most of the key features of what Žižek names the “hidden obverse” of the Cartesian cogito. Or in other words, the paper aims at showing that in order to “excavate” this hidden obverse or the missing link of Cartesian subjectivity, it is not necessary to involve later philosophy, such as Kant’s, but rather to analyse the epistemological aspects of works such as Bosch’s “Extraction of the Stone of Madness” and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly.