Küsse, Bisse, Ergo Sum: Penthesilea’s Furious Cogito. Reconsidering the Foucault-Derrida debate through the rhetoric of cannibalism

Abstract

In his 1989/90 EHESS seminar, Politiques de l’amitié: Manger l’autre, Jacques Derrida reads the final scene of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea aiming to show the systematic articulation of the following motifs: cannibalism, animality, the idiomatic quality of all signifying production, and the principial division of the subject or scene of every experience. Building on this, after outlining the main traits of Derrida’s conception and a reading of Kleist’s drama’s finale through Derrida’s lens, we will highlight t he elements t hat make it possible to question Michel Foucault’s early association of l iterature with madness, as well as h is later opposition between a good and a bad parrhesia. Despite their chronological and programmatic distance, this correlation and this opposition seem to be supported by the same gesture: the sublimation —or perhaps confinement— of a particular type of madness.