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“Mundus est fabula”: la invención del fracaso en el Discurso del Método de Descartes (1637)

Publicated to:Magallanica: revista de historia moderna. 9 (18): 53-74 - 2023-01-01 9(18), DOI:

Authors: Ríos, Iván de los

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Abstract

In the words of its own author, the Discourse on Method is a fable in which the story of two consecutive failures is told in the first person: the bookish failure of traditional education and the shipwreck of the traveler who, after having traveled through the Great Book del Mundo, returns to the solitude of consciousness with the hope of finding in himself that indubitable certainty that neither libraries nor the transfer of experience could offer him. In this paper we will work with the following hypothesis: the grandiose discourse of modern science that starts with the Discourse of Method is nourished and depends on a narrative strategy in which the figures of a failed life, failure and collapse play a fundamental role. We will suggest that the Cartesian paradigm is indebted to a certain conception of failure as a condition for the possibility of truth and success coupled with it and that said conception is articulated, in turn, in a paradoxical written condemnation of the mediate knowledge of Western literature, and the trip as a training model.

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