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different specialisms: medicine, psychology, psychopathology, psychoanalysis, his-
tory, social sciences, continental philosophy, linguistics and, above all, the one we
believe best links and relates them all: theoretical and practical narrative, literature.
All we are going to do, therefore, is suggest a hypothesis concerning the concept
of “rationality”, based on three texts by great authors of the 19th and 20th Centuries:
George Frazer, grandfather of anthropology, novelist Marcel Proust and linguist
Roman Jakobson.
The thesis we shall put forward can be summed up in three points:
1. In analyzing human thinking we come first to what can be described as “clas-
sical rationality”, which respects the classical principles of identity and lack of
contradiction.
2. But there is a set of linguistic phenomena (psychotic delirium; the discourse of
dreams; the incipient language of infants; magical thinking; poetry...) that do
not respect those basic principles of classical rationality. It is nevertheless pos-
sible to see reason in them by analyzing (as well as the classical rationality they
partly contain) the mechanisms of metaphorical and metonymical association
to be found in their structure. We shall call the dynamic governing this other
component of much communication “poetic or associative rationality”.
3. The human conversations that can be observed in every day life are an expres-
sion (in varying proportions) of classical and poetic (associative) rationality.
It is not possible to account for all the different forms of our thought and our
language without including this double component of what, together, could be
called “human rationality” or “generalized rationality”.
The underlying idea is that the history of western culture offers us two very different
models of the human subject. The first is whole, open, natural, clear and distinct,
simple, spontaneous, rational, sincere, transparent to him or herself, the Cartesian
subject.
The second model is that of the split subject, dark, artificial, paradoxical, com-
plex, repressed, multiple, contradictory, ironic, emotional, suspecting he or she is
constantly playing tricks and having tricks played on him or herself. This second
model (result of the slow digestion by European philosophy throughout the 20th
Century of the triple impact of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) is the subject of what
has been called the “philosophy of suspicion”. This is the one that interests us and
that this chapter will discuss.
We shall mention two real situations, taken from every day life.
1. A doctor talks, in a hospital corridor, with the son of one of his patients. Al-
though he has not said so openly, he already knows that she is gravely ill with a
malignant tumor. Showing her son a piece of paper he has in his hand, the doc-
tor says: “We've just received the results of your mother's autop. . . biopsy”.
2. A lecturer in History of Medicine writes on the blackboard the title of the class
on ergotism, a terrifying medieval illness that present day doctors are lucky not
to have to see. He notices smiles and whispers among the pupils, a little unusual.
He continues with his explanations but the stir among the pupils grows. When
