Preface

THE PRESENT BOOK presents a study done by two authors, Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. As authors, we have signed our chapters individually. But our work has developed in a close aesthetic-philosophical conversation over the past few years. In this way, the chapters intersect.

The research that moved our thoughts has been about the question of aesthetics in Descartes’s thought. The ambition has not only been to find out how a Cartesian aesthetics is interwoven in his thought, but above all to show its prismatic reach. This has required a consideration of a variety of materials that is not always considered together; the metaphysical writings as well as the essays in natural philosophy, the anthropology of the Passions, retrieved in letters as well as drawings and printed images and so on.

It has required, also, steps not only into a contemporary phenomenology that has been much influenced by the Cartesian meditations but also into a contemporary psychoanalytic thought. The prismatic reach means that the book stretches between questions and phenomena that are not symmetrical but are varieties of what we consider as aesthetic inquiries. To this belong the way in which perception interacts with emotions and thought, the way in which our gaze is directed toward limit-phenomena of beauty and fascination; the way in which pictures and images cross inside and outside; and the way in which a snowy landscape does it; the way in which beauty raises our instinct of love through body and soul, and the way in which infantile life fosters the reverse, hatred and revulsion.

In order to open the paths toward a Cartesian aesthetics, we organized an evening in Stockholm in 2018, a soirée with talks and music on the topic. For a country that has seen the death of one of the world’s greatest philosophers, attached to queen Christina, such events have been surprisingly few. But the event was noteworthy above all for another reason: it received the presence and contribution of Jean-Luc Nancy.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work on philosophy and on Descartes has greatly inspired what we have tried to achieve. It is also dedicated to his memory as a thanks for his contribution to this project, incorporated in our reflections.

A few of the chapters have been published as articles in other versions; Cecilia Sjöholm: “Descartes, Emotions and the Inner Life of the Subject,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, ed. Donald Wehrs (London: Palgrave, 2017); “Figures of Snow: Preconceptual Dimensions of Descartes’s Meteorology,” in Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy (2022); and “The Thinking Fetus: Descartes at the Brink of Psychoanalysis,” in Emotions: History, Culture, Society 5 (2021).

For the completion of this book, we wish to thank the Swedish Research Council, which graciously granted us funding for the project.