This dissertation inquires into the unsettling distinction between madness and reason using Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the Cartesian Cogito to investigate and demonstrate the construction of (im)possible representations of schizophrenia. Derrida challenges knowledge-based conceptions of subjectivity while troubling the fixed notions of the human subject on which institutions of power—including psychiatry and education research—depend. Arguing that the relation between madness and reason is one of the most elusive of philosophical oppositions, I draw on Derridean deconstruction to destabilize the colonial aspect of Western metaphysical heritage (with its hierarchized relations between self and other, sane and insane). While examining issues in the application of human rights to mental health patients, I also reconsider psychiatry's biomedical model of schizophrenia from the standpoint of the Derridean critique of subjectivity. My purpose, however, is less to explore the imperialistic power of psychiatry than to demonstrate how psychiatry's definitions of what it means to be human and to be sane are presupposed in philosophical determinations of the binary relation between madness and reason. This demonstration is carried forward via a critical examination of the autobiographical writings of a research "participant" who, in this text, confronts the (im)possibility of (re)constructing her childhood memories of her mother's suicide attempt and involuntary psychiatric treatment. Through this illustrative figure, whose identity deconstructs the essentialistic understanding of the dichotomy researcher-researched, reader and writer (re)discover the (im)possibility of writing schizophrenia in the language of reason. To read this writing, I draw on the notions of "semiotic language" and "abjection" deployed by Julia Kristeva in her critique of paternalistic psychoanalytic understanding. Finally, drawing on the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, mediated by the thinking of Derrida, I discuss ethical possibilities for teaching the humanity of others within literary education as implicated by the ethical question that confronts the reader and writer of so-called autobiography. This examination is executed via an exploration of "recognition" as the force of being exposed to the other and as an acknowledgment of judgment and is offered as a call to transform subjectivity into sensibility so as to embody compassion in our everyday practices of reading and writing.