Descartes’s Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time
Georges van den Abbeele
Fordham University Press eBooks October 3, 2023 DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9781531503291.003.0002 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Nancy reads Descartes's cogito as "iterative"—a foundational statement that must be repeated "each time" in its singularity, yielding not a continuous self-actualizing subject but endless interruption of self-evidence and self-sensing. The chapter contends this same thesis underlies Nancy's later work on writing, "fabling," and "corporal areality," and his deconstruction of the body/mind opposition as an "as-if one" (unum quid). |
Abstract
This chapter explicates Nancy’s radical and foundational rereading of Descartes, first in the 1978 monograph, Ego sum, then over the course of the rest of Nancy’s work. Nancy reads Descartes’s cogito as singularly interrupted, or “iterative.” He urges us to grasp the foundational statement, ego sum, ego existo, as necessarily iterative, as having to be repeated in its singularity, “each time.” Far from the continuity of a self-actualizing subjectivity, we encounter the endless interruption of self-evidence, of self-sensing, that can never be fully evident beyond the singular event of its utterance. The analysis enabled by this perspective opens a set of figures that will stake out the senses of the scene of writing, of philosophy’s self-presentation, of world-making or “fabling,” and of corporal areality. All of these emerge in later works as prominent concerns of Nancy’s philosophical attention. Most importantly, Nancy’s subsequent deconstruction of the opposition between body and mind (or the sensible and the intelligible) derives from this same thesis of interrupted consciousness while revealing that relation as an unum quid, or “as-if one,” that unravels the ways in which thinking and perceiving, meaning and sensation, are differing but interrelated forms of cogitation, differing kinds of sense-making.