Abstract

René Descartes plays a small but pivotal role in Jacques Derrida’s 1961–62 course, ‘The Notion of World’. In contrast, one finds the world everywhere in Descartes’ own texts, from the Discourse on Method to The World. A more extensive discussion of Descartes’ world is found in Derrida’s 1981/82 seminar, Language and the Discourse on Method, which takes up Descartes’ travels throughout the world, a spacing before Cartesian extension, and the tension between universal reason, shared by the whole world, and the necessity of writing philosophy in one language rather than others.