Notes

Introduction

1.Erec Koch has made this description, although he uses it differently than we do in this book—to Koch it designates the image of a body/instrument. See The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility and Corporeality in 17^th Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 24.

2.Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, trans. Johan Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 19.

3.Hannah Arendt, Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 2–3.

4.Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 1957), 1–3.

5.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, trans. Johan Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 16.

6.“He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition.” (Er hat den archimedischen Punkt gefunden, hat ihn aber gegen sich ausgenutzt, offenbar hat er ihn nur unter dieser Bedingung finden dürfen.) Franz Kafka, Aphorisms, quoted in Arendt, Human Condition, 248.

7.Jean-Paul Sartre. “La liberté cartésienne,” in Descartes 1596–1650. Introduction et choix par J.-P. Sartre (Genève-Paris: Trois Collines, coll. “Les Classiques de la Liberté,” 1946), 10–11, trans. Annette Michelson, “Cartesian Freedom,” in Literary Philosophical and Essays (New York: Collier, 1962), 180–198.

8.See, for instance, from the analytical point of view, Lilli Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and from the continental tradition, works by Jean-Luc Marion such as On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); On Descartes’ Passive Thought: The Myth of Cartesian Dualism, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and by Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego sum: corpus, anima, fabula, trans. Marie-Eve Morin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), Corpus I. trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

9.Lilli Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of the Mind; Sara Heinämaa and Timo Kaitaro, “Descartes’s Notion of the Mind-Body Union and Its Phenomenological Expositions,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Sabina Ebbersmeyer, ed. Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).

10.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Taylor Carman (London: Routledge, 2002).

11.See, for instance, Lilla Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind; Sara Heinämaa and Timo Kaitaro, “Descartes’ Notion of the Mind–Body Union and Its Phenomenological Expositions.”

12.See, for instance, Erik Larsen, “Le baroque et l’esthétique de Descartes” in Baroque [En ligne], 6 (1973), http://journals.openedition.org/baroque/416; DOI: 10.4000/baroque.416; R. Darren Gobert, The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); E. Gilby, Descartes’ Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

13.Pascal Dumont, Descartes et l’esthétique. L’art d’emerveiller (Paris: PUF, 2017), 236.

14.Dumont, Descartes et l’esthétique, 235.

1. Descartes’s Visceral Aesthetics

1.Richard Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 1 (1997): 29–41; and Richard Shusterman, “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 2 (2006): 217–229.

2.Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 7–15.

3.Cf. the analysis of Kant’s notion of beauty in Fiona Hughes, Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology: Form and World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

4.Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki, “Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 7 (2011): e21852, https://doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021852.

5.Gianluca Consoli, “A Cognitive Theory of the Aesthetic Experience,” Contemporary Aesthetics 10 (2012).

6.Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).

7.Descartes, Discourse on Method in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols. I–III, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. I 112, AT IV, 4.

8.Descartes, Treatise on Man, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 99, AT XI, 120.

9.Pascal Dumont, Descartes et l’esthétique: l’art d’émerveiller (Paris: PUF, 1998); Erik Larsen, “Le baroque et l’esthétique de Descartes,” Baroque 6 (1973). http://journals.openedition.org/baroque/416; DOI: 10.4000/baroque.416; Brigitte Van Wymeersch, “L’esthétique musicale de Descartes et le cartésianisme,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 94, no. 2 (1996): 271–293, 283.

10.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 279–280, AT IXB, 315–317.

11.Fernand Hallyn, Les Olympiques de Descartes (Genève: Librairie Droz S. A, 1995).

12.Descartes, Discourse on the Method, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 114, AT VI, 7.

13.Descartes, Compendium on Music, trans. Walter Robert (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1961), 11, AT X, 89.

14.Descartes to Mersenne, March 18, 1630, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 20, AT, 132–134.

15.“Un rapport de nostre iugement à l’objet; & pource que les iugemens des hommes sont si differens, on ne peut dire que le beau, ny l’agreable, ayent aucune mesure determinée [. . .] ce qui plaira à plus de gens, pourra estre nommé simplement le plus beau, ce qui ne sçauroit estre determiné.” Descartes to Mersenne, March 8, 1630, AT I.

16.Descartes to Huygens, November 1, 1635, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 50, AT I, 331.

17.Descartes to Beeckman, April 23, 1619, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 3, AT X, 157.

18.See note 38. One may, as Dennis Sepper has done, confer the intelligibility of the universe to “analogies” of a divine source, which is also what makes algebra meaningful despite its lack of objects. “Figuring Things Out: Figurate Problem-Solving in the Early Descartes,” in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger, John Andrew Schuster, and John Sutton, 245 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

19.Descartes, Treatise on Music, 14–15, AT X, 95.

20.As exemplified by Kate van Orden: “The senses were instruments of control—receptors to be packed with edifying stimuli and tools of external domination.” Both dance and drill “train the body to react automatically to regular stimuli.” “Descartes of Musical Training and the Body,” in Music Sensation and Sensuality, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern (London: Routledge, 2002), 31, 33.

21.Richard A. Watson, Descartes’s Ballet, His Doctrine of the Will and His Political Philosophy (with a transcript and English translation of La Naissance de la Paix) (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 2007).

22.Descartes to Mersenne, March 18, 1630, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 19–20, AT I, 117–123.

23.Cf. Koch, Aesthetic Body, 24.

24.Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 100–104, AT II, 41–44, 144–146, 164–166.

25.Descartes, The Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, 146, AT II, 174.

26.Descartes, The Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, 150, AT II, 177.

27.The term natural philosophy can be used to cover “the sciences”—optics, astronomy, and so on—whereas the idea of “science” is a nineteenth-century invention. Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton, eds., Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000). See also the work of Horst Bredekamp—for instance, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images beyond Imagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Sybille Krämer and Christina Ljungberg, eds., Thinking with Diagrams (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2016).

28.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-sense, 14.

29.See, for instance, Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 57–97; and Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 53–83.

30.Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 64–65.

31.Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, Tome XI (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1909), 659. See also Alain Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, Tome II (Paris: 1691), 433–434.

32.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Cambridge: Hackett, 1995), 17. In the English translation, physicien is translated as physicist, which does not quite capture the philosophical connotation.

33.See, for instance, Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 22, AT XI, 332.

34.The mind is the thinking soul, to Descartes. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes vol. I, 246.

35.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, xv.

36.Descartes, Meditations, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 2, AT VII, 34.

37.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 281, AT VIIIA, 320–321.

38.As Darren Gobert has shown, theater became “Cartesian” not only in terms of the plots, the stage, and the acting but also of the passions explored, of which wonder was privileged. The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theatre (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 41–45.

39.Gobert, Mind-Body Stage, 86–87.

40.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 67, AT XI, 391–392, 395.

41.Cf. Dominik Perler, Feelings Transformed: Philosophical Theories of the Emotions, 1270–1670, trans. Tony Crawford (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); or perception, as in Walter Ott, Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). As Walter Ott shows, Descartes’s theories of perception responded to the question of how we are to conceive of sensible qualities such as color, sound, and so on, if they are neither an aspect of the objective world of cognition nor an inherent aspect of subjectivity. One may argue that aspects of the soul such as desire and love respond to the need to account for experiences of the outside world that cannot be accounted for in objective terms (i.e., geometrical, for instance).

42.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 119–122, AT XI, 469–472.

43.Descartes, Treatise on Man, 150, AT II, 177.

44.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 46, AT XI, 366.

45.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 53, AT XI, 374–375.

46.Descartes to Chanut, June 6, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 322–323, AT V, 57.

47.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 69, AT XI, 396.

48.Translated by Stephen Voss as abhorrence throughout The Passions of the Soul.

49.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 65, AT 391–392.

50.See the discussion on object relations in the chapter “The Thinking Fetus.”

51.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 79, AT XI, 412.

52.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 68, AT XI, 395.

53.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 69, AT XI, 396.

54.René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes vol. II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), 26 [37].

55.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 65, AT XI, 392.

56.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, AT XI, 369.

57.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 67, AT XI, 395.

58.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 109, AT XI, 454–455.

59.Georges Bataille, Prehistoric Painting or the Birth of Art (London: MacMillan, 1920), 31.

60.Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (Columbia: Columbia University Press), 1982.

61.Georges Bataille, “Formless,” Documents #1 (Paris, 1929), 382, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., Georges Bataille: Vision of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31.

62.Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 198.

63.Paul Hoffman, Essays on Descartes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 108–113.

64.Mario Perniola, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (London: Continuum, 2004), 8.

65.Cf. John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1998.

2. Philosophical Emotion

1.“Je dis ému, car il est possible de l’être par des causes purement ‘intellectuelles.’ Il y a chez quelques-uns, vous en êtes bien sûrs, une manière de sensibilité intellectuelle [. . .] L’émotion intellectuelle est évidement plus rare que les autres. L’art qui la fixe et la restitue ne peut avoir qu’une résonance restreinte.” La creation artistique in Paul Valéry, Vues (Paris: La table ronde, 1948), 287–288.

2.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 338–339.

3.For a discussion of “intellectual emotions” in Descartes that, however, does not search to develop a notion of “philosophical emotion,” see Gábor Boros, Sur les émotions intellectuelles chez Descartes, http://filozofiaiszemle.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/G%C3%A1bor-Boros-Sur-les-%C3%A9motions-intellectuelles-chez-Descartes.pdf; and also Pierre Guenancia, L’intelligence du sensible: Essai sur le dualisme cartésien (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).

4.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 328.

5.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 328.

6.In his discussions on the passivity and the passion of thought in Descartes, Jean-Luc Marion comes close to what I am calling here reflexivity when discussing, for instance, Descartes’s affirmation that “it is certain that we cannot will anything without thereby perceiving that we are willing it,” hence, that active thought is only possible being at the same time passive. However, he does not address the question of the emotion provoked and experienced by this “reflexivity.” See Jean-Luc Marion, Sur la pensée passive de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 2013), On Descartes’ Passive Thought: The Myth of Cartesian Dualism, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 209.

7.“At that time I was in Germany, where I had been called by the wars that are not yet ended there. While I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert med and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.” Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 116.

8.For a close study of Descartes’s early writings, see Henri Gouhier, Les premières pensées de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1958).

9.Fernand Hallyn, Les Olympiques de Descartes (Genève: Librairie Droz S. A., 1995).

10.Adrien Baillet, La Vie de M. Des-Cartes, Premiere partie. A Paris, chez Daniel Hort-hemels, Rue saint Jacques, au Mécénas. M. DC. XCI. Avec privilege du roi.: 1691, quoted in AT X, 180f, Eng. trans. already 1693, The Life of Monsieur Des Cartes, containing the history of his philosophy and works: as also the most remarkable things that befell him during the whole course of his life. London: Printed for R. Simpson, 1693, vol. I, 80–86.

11.To read the whole narrative, see the appendix in which W. T. Jones’s translation is reproduced. Jone’s translation was originally published in “Somnio ergo sum: Descartes three dreams” in Philosophy and Literature 4, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 145–162.

12.The Latin text of the opening sentence was transcribed, “X. Novembris 1619, cum plenus forem Enthousiasmo, et mirabilis scientiae fundamenta reperirem.” A marginal note at the beginning of the work read, “XL Novembris, coepi intelligere fundamentum inventi mirabilis—11 November I began to understand the basis of the marvelous discovery.” This is the form given in the inventory of Descartes’s papers published in René Descartes, 1596–1650. Oeuvres. 10 publ. par, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1969), 7. The sentence quoted in Baillet’s Vie, as printed in Oeuvres 10, s. 179, adds the year 1620. Is this an error, or did Descartes take a year to begin his understanding? (This note follows in Benton’s translation.)

13.A marginal note reads: “Divided in five books, printed at Lyon and Geneva, etc.” This information helps to identify the work as the Corpus omnium veierum poetarum latinorum, edited by Pierre de Brosses, which appeared in two editions before 1619, the first at Lyon in 1603, the second at Geneva in 1611. The Corpus was “big,” being composed of two volumes in quarto, the first of 1,426 pages and the second of 888 pages (895 in the 1611 edition).

14.The poem, entitled Ex Graeco Pythagoricum, de ambiguitate eligendae vitae, Edyllium XV, was printed in vol. I of the Corpus, 655 (first edition) or 658 (second edition). It is printed with an English translation as Eclogue 2 in Ausonius, ed. H. G. E. White, Loeb Library (2 vols., London, 1919), vol. I, 162–169. On Ausonius’s Eclogue and the crossroads of Pythagoras, see S. K. Heninger Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1974), 269–271 (note from Benton’s translation). For a digital version, see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0609%3Asection%3D2.

15.The poem “Est et Non” is the fourth Eclogue of Ausonius, ed. White, ibid., 170–173. The poem vigorously attacks empty dialectic debate. According to Norman K. Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes (London: Russell & Russell, 1952), 35, the two poems of Ausonius appear on the same page of the 1603 edition of the Corpus poetarum, the edition that Descartes surely used at the Jesuit College of La Fleche, and on facing pages of the edition of 1611 (note from Benton’s translation). Ausonius’s poem The Pythagorean “Yea” and “Nay” reads as following in the refered English translation:

“yes” and “no”: all the world constantly uses these familiar monosyllables. Take these away and you leave nothing for the tongue of man to discuss. In them is all, and all from them; be it a matter of business or pleasure, of bustle or repose. Sometimes two parties both use one word or the other at the same time, but often they are opposed, according as men easy or contentions in character and temperament are engaged in discussion. If both agree, forth with “Yea, yea” breaks in; but if they dispute, then disagreement will throw in a “Nay.” From these arises the uproar which splits the air of the courts, from these the feuds of the maddened Circus and the wide-spread partisanship which fills the tiers of the theatre, from these the debates which occupy the Senate. Wives, children, fathers, bandy these two words in peaceful debate without unnatural quarrelling. They are the instruments with which the schools fit for peaceful learning wage their harmless war of philosophical strife. On them the whole throng of rhetoricians depends in its wordy contests: “You grant that it is light?” Yes? Then it is day!” “No, the point is not granted; for whenever many torches or lightening-flashes gives light by night, yes, it is light; but it is not the light of the day.” It is a case of “yes” and “no” then; for we are bound to say: “Yes, it is light,” and “No, it is not day.” There you have the source of countless squabbles: that is why some—nay, many—pondering on such things, smother their gruff protests and bite their lips in raging silence.

What a thing is the life of man which two monosyllables toss about!

16.Neither of the editions of the Corpus printed before 1619 contained copperplate engravings.

17.This passage is very close to the Latin of the Cogitationes privatae, printed in Descartes, Oeuvres 10, publ. par, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 217: “Mirum videri possit, quare graves sententiae in scriptis poetarum, magis quam philosophorum. Ratio est quod poetae per enthusiasmum et vim imaginationis scripsere: sunt in nobis semina scientiae, ut in silice, quae per rationem a philosophis educuntur per imaginationem a poetis excutiuntur magisque elucent.”

18.This passage is the only indication that Descartes considered a detail of the dream predictive.

19.Descartes was with the imperial army at Neuberg on the Danube when he had this dream. Three months before (when he had last drunk wine), he attended the coronation of Emperor Ferdinand II at Frankfurt.

20.See, for example, Jean-Luc Marion, “Does Thought Dream? The Three Dreams, or the Awkening of the Philosopher,” in Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

21.Sigmund Freud, “Some Dreams of Descartes: A Letter to Maxime Leroy,” in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, (Unspecified, 1961), 197–204.

22.Baillet in Descartes, Oeuvres. 10, publ. par, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996) 179, 1. 18; 181, 1. 12.

23.See Jean-Luc Marion. “Does Thought Dream? The Three Dreams, or the Awkening of the Philosopher,” in Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

24.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 116.

25.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 117.

26.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 117.

27.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, 120.

28.Descartes, “First Set of Replies,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 81. The French original reads: “De la même manière que la connaissance de Dieu en tant que cause supérieur est immédiate et non per progressum in infinitum” in (Réponses aux premières Objections Oeuvres. 9, publ. par, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 88.

29.Ferdinand Alquié, “Descartes et l’immédiat,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1950, 370–375.

30.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 127.

31.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 127.

32.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 127.

33.As Denis Kambouchner has suggested in his book Descartes n’a pas dit (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2015), 63.

34.Paul Valéry, Comments on Descartes from the Notebooks in Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Masters and Friends, vol. 9, trans. Martin Turnell (New York: Princeton University Press, 1968), 311.

35.It is the motto that according to Pausanias was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.

36.For a presentation of this dominant view and a discussion about the modern philosophical concept of reflection in Descartes and post-Cartesian philosophy, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

37.Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52.

38.Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes and Related Materials, trans. Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), § 626, 229.

39.“Die Überlegung (reflexio) hat es nicht mit den Gegenstände selbst zu tun, um gerade von ihnen Begriffe zu bekommen, sondern ist der Zustand des Gemüts, in welchem wir uns zuerts dazu anskicken, um die subjektiven Bedingungen ausfinden zu machen, unter denen wir zu Begriffen gelangen können. Sie ist das Bewußtsein des Verhältnisses gegebener Vortsellungen zu unseren verschiedenen Erkenntnisquellen, durch welchs allein ihr Verhältnis untereinander richtig bestimmen warden kann” (Immanuel Kant, Werkausgabe: in 12 Bänden. Bd 4 Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; 1976.) V, Amphibolie der Reflexionsbegriffe I, 290, f. Rc 354). Eng. trans. “Reflection (reflexio) does not have to do with objects themselves, in order to acquire concepts directly from them, but is rather the state of mind in which we first prepare ourselves to find out the subjective conditions under which we can arrive at concepts. It is the consciousness of the relation of given representations to our various sources of cognition, through which alone their relation among themselves can be correctly determined,” Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 366.

40.Kant, I, ibid.

41.Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), 177.

42.Kambouchner, Descartes n’a pas dit, 72.

43.Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), §.

44.Heidegger, Being and Time, § 43, 195. Jean-François Courtine is not incorrect in pointing out that Heidegger is not simply denying the “sum,” the “subject,” but radicalizing the Cartesian sum in its worldliness and existentiality. See Jean-François Courtine, “Les méditations cartésiennes de Martin Heidegger,” Les Études Philosophiques 1 no. 88 (2009): 103–115.

45.Tobias Keiling, “Ars Cogitans: Überlegungen mit descartes und Husserl zum Ursprung des Kunstwerks,” Kalliope, Zeitschrift für Literatur und Kunst, Heft I (2009): 72.

46.For an account on Husserl’s critique of Descartes, see Jean-Marc Laporte, S. J. “Husserl’s Critique of Descartes,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 23, no. 3 (March 1963): 335–352.

47.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Taylor Carman (London: Routledge, 2002 [1962]).

48.Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 464.

49.Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 310.

50.For an account and critique of Heidegger’s invented formula, see Jean-Marie Beyssade, Descartes au fil de l’ordre (Paris: PUF, 2001), 181; and Christophe Perrin, “Cogito me cogitare.” Note pour servir la généalogie et la téléologie d’une formule clé de G. W. Leibniz à J-L Marion,” Phainomena 23, no. 88–89, http://www.sif-praha.cz/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Cogito-me-cogitare.pdf.

51.Descartes, “Correspondence,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, 357. French original, Oeuvres 5, Adam and Tannery, 221: “C’est une autre chose d’avoir de conscience de nos pensées au moment où nous pensons, et autre chose de s’en souvenir par après.”

52.Descartes, Oeuvres, Adam and Tannery, 7, 481.

53.The earliest known translation as “I am thinking, therefore I am” is from 1872 by Charles Portenfield Krauth. The similar translation, “I am thinking, therefore I exist” of Descartes’s correspondence in French (“je pense, donc je suis”), appears in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes by Cottingham et al.

54.G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, werke 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 127; Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III, trans. R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart with assistance of H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 131.

55.Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). The English version translated Bildung as formation of reason, XXX.

56.Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 127.

57.This passage does not figure in the English translation, which should be in the middle of page 140. This is my own translation. The German reads as follows: “Aber das Denken als Subjekt ist das Denkende, und das ist Ich; das Denken ist das innere Beimirsein, die Unmittelbarkeit bei mir, - es ist das einfache Wissen selbst. Die Unmittelbarkeit ist aber eben dasselbe als was Sein heißt,” G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, werke 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 132.

58.G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III, werke 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 131, Eng. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 140.

59.The Latin expression ars cogitans means “art of thinking.” It was in fact this title that Antoine Arnaud and Pierre Nicole gave to their Logic, which represents an important Treatise of the Logic of Port- Royal, published in 1662 under the title La logique ou l’art de penser. Eng.

Antoine Arnaud and Pierre Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This work received in the last decades a renewed attention mostly due to the importance Noam Chomsky attributed to it as a percussor of modern transformational generative grammar (see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, 3rd ed., edited with a new introduction by James McGilvray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). It differs, however, from the meaning we are giving to the expression “art of thought”; thus, what is being intended in our investigation is the way of thinking the act of thinking while it is taking place.

60.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, 184.

61.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, 184.

62.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, 184.

63.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, 185.

64.Cf. Christia Mercer, “Descartes’s Debt to Teresa of Avila, or Why Should We Work on Women in the History of Philosophy,” Philosophical Studies 174, no. 10 (2017).

65.Jacques Derrida, Circonfession (La bibliothèque des Voix) (Paris: des femmes, 2004).

66.Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

67.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 12.

68.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 131.

69.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 53.

70.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 53.

71.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 130–131.

72.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

73.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

74.See Derrida’s discussions with Foucault about Descartes and madness in Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 1978), 36–76. Originally published as “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 68, no. 4 (October–December 1963): 460–494. See also Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Mad Derrida: Ipso facto cogitans ac demens,” in Adieu, Derrida, ed. Costas Douzinas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

75.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

76.Martial Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons (Paris: Aubier, 1953).

77.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 130.

78.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 131.

79.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

80.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

81.Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). See also my discussions about sleep in Aristotle in Sá Cavalcante Schuback, “The Hermeneutic Slumber: Aristotle’s Reflections on Sleep,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle, ed. Claudia Baracchi (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

82.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 15.

83.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 15.

84.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 15.

85.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 16.

86.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 17.

87.Dugald Murdoch, “Abstraction vs. Exclusion,” in The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

88.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 18.

89.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 18; see the Latin original: Oeuvres VII, Adam and Tannery, s. 27, Cogitare?, Hic invenio: cogitatio est; haec sola a me divelli nequit. Ego sum, ego existo; certum eft. Quandiu autem? Nempe quandiu cogito; nam forte etiam fieri posset, si cessarem ab omni cogitatione, ut illico totus efle definerem. Nihil nunc admitto nisi quod necessario sit verum; sum igitur praecise tantùm res cogitans, id est, mens, sive animus, sive intelledus, sive ratio, voces mihi prius significationis ignotae. Sum autem res vera, et vere existens; sed qualis res? Dixi, cogitans.

90.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 19.

91.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 24.

92.D. Arbib, ed., Les Méditations métaphysiques, Objections et réponses de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 2019).

93.What Descartes presents here in nuce, Bergson developed later with his concept of durée, duration. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001 [1913]).

94.Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 140.

95.Ibid.

96.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 21.

97.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 21.

3. Descartes’s Performative Cogito

1.Descartes, “Discourse on Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 127.

2.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, pt. 1, § 7, 194–195. (Latin:) Sic autem rejicientes illa omnia, de quibus aliquo modo possumus dubitare, ac etiam, falsa esse fingentes, facilè quidem, supponimus nullum esse Deum, nullum coelum, nulla corpora; nosque etiam ipsos, non habere manus, nec pedes, nec denique ullum corpus, non autem ideò nos qui talia cogitamus nihil esse: repugnat enim ut putemus id quod cogitat eo ipso tempore quo cogitat non existere. Ac proinde haec cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum, est omnium prima & certissima, quae cuilibet ordine philosophanti occurrat.

3.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 17.

4.Kambouchner, Descartes n’a pas dit, 63.

5.Descartes, “The Search for Truth,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 418–419. The French original of this dialogue has disappeared; only a part could be found at Hannover’s Library. Nevertheless, there exists a Latin translation from 1701 published at Amsterdam in Descartes’s Opuscula posthuma. This part of the dialogue only exists in Latin. The French translation of the Latin translation reads as follows:

Puisque Poliandre est content, je m’en tiens là également, et je ne pousserai pas plus loin la controverse. Cependant, je ne vois pas qu’il ait beaucoup progressé depuis deux heures que nous avons passes ici à raisonner. Tout ce qu’il a appris, grâce à cette belle method que vous prônez tant, c’est seulement qu’il doute, qu’il pense et qu’il est une chose pensante. Certes, c’est admirable! Voilà beaucoup de paroles pour bien peu de choses. Cela aurait pu être dit en quatre mots et nous aurions tous été d’accord. Quant à moi, si je devais dépenser autant de paroles et de temps pour apprendre une chose de si peu d’importance, j’aurais du mal à m’y résigner. Descartes, Oeuvres et Lettres (Paris: Pléiade, Gallimard, 1953), 900.

6.Descartes, “The Search for Truth,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 419.

7.Descartes, “Second Set of Replies,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 100.

8.J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 6.

9.Austin, How to do things with words? 99.

10.Jaako Hintikka, “‘Cogito, ergo sum’: Inference or Performance?” Philosophical Review 71, no. 2 (1962): 3–32. See also his response to critique made by Julius R. Weinberg and James D. Carney of this paper in “Ergo sum as Inference and a Performance,” Philosophical Review 72, no. 4 (October 1963): 487–496.

11.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 16.

12.Jean Wahl, Du rôle de l’idée de l’instant dans la philosophie de Descartes (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920).

13.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 323.

14.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 323, original, Descartes, Oeuvres 7, Adam and Tannery, 481.

15.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 324, original, Descartes, Oeuvres 7, Adam and Tannery, 481.

16.Saint Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 189.

17.See here the poetical meditation by Pascal Quignard, Mourir de penser (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2014), 179.

18.Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego sum.

19.French original, Oeuvres 5, Adam and Tannery, 221: “C’est une autre chose d’avoir de conscience de nos pensées au moment où nous pensons, et autre chose de s’en souvenir par après”; Descartes, “Correspondence,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III, I, 357.

20.Ibid.

21.Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 21.

22.Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 15.

23.Descartes, “Six Sets of Replies,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 285.

24.The original title was “L’Homme de René Descartes, et un Traité de la Formation du Foetus du même auteur. Aved des Remarques de Louis de la Forge, Docteur en médicine, demeurant à La Flèche, sur le Traité de l’Homme de René descartes, et sur les Figures par lui inventés.” The book was translated into Latin by Florent Schuyl and published in 1662 at Leyden. See the chapters by Cecilia Sjöholm in this book, “Descartes, Images and Drives” and “The Thinking Fetus.”

25.Descartes, “Treatise on Man,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 108.

26.Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 107–108.

27.Paul Valéry, “Leonard and the Philosophers,” “Introduction to the Method of Leo-nardo da Vinci,” in Complete works by Paul Valéry, vol. 8, Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé, trans. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler (New York: Princeton University press, 1972).

28.Cf. Leonardo da Vinci. Notebooks, vols. I and II.

29.Descartes, “Treatise on Man,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 106.

30.Descartes, “Treatise on Man,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 106.

31.Descartes, “Treatise on Man,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 100.

32.Descartes, “Treatise on Man,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 100–101.

33.For an account on the role of aesthetic forms in science and how this directly connected to Descartes philosophy, see Claus Zittel, Theatrum philosophicum: Descartes und die Rolle ästhetischer Formen in der Wissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009). See also C. Sjöholm in her chapters in this book.

34.Jacques Derrida, Memoirs d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), trans. Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

35.Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 29.

36.“Léonard est peintre: Je dis qu’il a la peinture pour philosophie,” Paul Valéry, “Leonard et les philosophes,” Pleiade, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1259.

37.There are nonetheless different readings of Descartes’s in Merleau-Ponty. See, for instance, his discussions on the cogito in The Phenomenology of Perception.

38.Claude Lefort, introduction from L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 26, for Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind in English. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind [L’Œil et l’esprit, Paris: Gallimard, 1961] trans. Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–190. Revised translation by Michael Smith in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (1993), 121–149.

39.Claude Lefort, introduction from L’oeil et l’esprit.

40.Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, 18, Eng. version, 162.

41.Ibid., 21, Eng. 163.

42.23, Eng. 164.

43.27, Eng. 166.

44.27–28, Eng. 166.

45.Daniel Giovannangelli, “Descartes et l’énigme de la vision,” in La fiction de l’être: Lectures de la philosophie moderne (Paris: De Boeck, 1990), 9–18.

46.Merleau-Ponty, Eye and the Spirit, op. cit., 34.

47.Ibid., 34.

48.Robert Delaunay, Du cubisme à l’art abstratit, Bibliothèque générale de l’École pratique des hautes études. Section 6, Centre de recherches historiques, Paris, 1957.

49.Merleau-Ponty, Eye and the Spirit, op. cit., 34.

50.Cf. translation.

51.Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone, 1989 [1948]).

52.Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, 38, Eng. version 170.

53.Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, 39, Eng. 170.

54.Ikonografi.

55.Descartes, “Optics,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 165–166.

56.Descartes, “The World,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 81.

57.Descartes, “The World,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 81.

58.Lucien Vinciguerra, La representation excessive: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Pascal (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013).

59.M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Repr. London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1989 [1974]).

60.Oeil l’esprit, 40, Eng. 171.

61.Ibid., 41, Eng. 171.

62.Ibid.

63.42, Eng. 172.

64.Darren Hynes, “Parallel Traditions in the Image of Descartes: Iconography, Intention, and Interpretation” International History Review 32, no. 4 (December 2010): 575–597.

65.43, Eng. 172.

66.Ibid.

67.Ibid.

68.“Comme tout serait plus limpide dans notre philosophie si l’on pouvait exorciser ces spectres, en faire des illusions ou des perceptions sans objet, en marge d’un monde sans équivoque! La Dioptrique de Descartes est cette tentative. C’est le bréviaire d’une pensée qui ne veut plus hanter le visible et décide de le reconstruire selon le modèle qu’elle s’en donne. Il vaut la peine de rappeler ce que fut cet essai, et cet échec.”

69.Descartes, “Optics,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 165: “We should, however, recall that our mind can be stimulated by many things other than images—by signs and words, for example, which in no way resemble the things they signify.” About the question of language in Descartes, see Pierre-Alain Cahné, Un autre Descartes: Le philosophe et son langage (Paris: Vrin, 1980).

70.Ibid.

71.As suggested by Lucien Vinciguerra, La representation excessive, 51–106.

72.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

73.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

74.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

75.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 13.

76.Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, 14.

77.Merleau-Ponty, The Doubt of Cézanne in Sense and Non-sense, translated, with a preface, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1982 [1964]), 18.

78.Original, AT VI, 41–42, Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, 133.

4. Rhythms of Snow

1.Descartes, Meteorology. Throughout, the translation of Paul J. Olscamp will be used, and therefore I will abstain from using the alternative English translation of Les Méteóres, The Meteors, which is sometimes seen. Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 312, AT VI, 299.

2.Descartes, Meteorology, 313, AT VI, 300.

3.Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 20.

4.Descartes, Meteorology, 321, AT VI 311.

5.Descartes, Meteorology, 329, AT VI, 321.

6.In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s seminar on nature, Descartes is considered as an inventor of a modern concept of nature, closer to a positivist conception than a rationalist one. La nature (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995) 26, 31.

7.See, for instance, Daniel Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1999); Antonia Damasio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Penguin, 2005).

8.See, for instance, Theo Verbeer, “The Invention of Nature,” 149–168; Veronique Foti, “Descartes’ Intellectual and Corporeal Memories,” 591–604; Gordon Baker, “The Senses and Witnesses,” 604–630; and Catherine Wilson, “Descartes and the Corporeal Mind; Some Implications of the Regius Affair,” 659–680 in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, ed. Stephen Gaukroger.

9.Lucian Petrescu has shown how the matter analyzed is not considered in terms of the “real distinction” or the res extensa but is the result of a deduction following mechanical principles. “Cartesian Meteors and Scholastic Meteors: Descartes against the School in 1637,” Journal of the History of Ideas 76, no. 1 (2015): 25–45.

10.Dennis Sepper has demonstrated the many varieties that this relation may take in Descartes’s writings in a seminal book on Descartes’s Imagination: Proportion, Images and the Activity of Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Imagination is much more than the capacity of the mind to represent things as internal images outside of an empirical reality; it is also “phantasia,” presented like an organ of the body in rule twelve in Rules of the Direction of the Mind (Sepper, 30); it is the mathematical-physical imagery of proportion, the representation of dreams, and so on.

11.Svante Nordin, Filosofins historia: det västerländska förnuftets historia från Thales till postmodernismen (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2017), 100.

12.See, for example, the letter to Mersenne where Descartes says that he wishes to demonstrate nature’s building blocks through the most beautiful examples. Letter to Mersenne, January 1630 Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1969), Tome III, 492 (the complete works in French will be referred to as AT). Cf. also Principles of Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, ed. and trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 288.

13.Descartes, Meteorology, 263, AT VI, 231.

14.Claus Zittel, Theatrum Philosophicum Descartes und die Rolle ästhetischer Formen in die Wissenschaft (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), 193. As Craig Martin has shown, the Aristotelian tradition is more present than Descartes admits when it comes to presenting what counts as the field of meteorology as such, especially in the work presented as part of Le Monde. In the version published in 1937, the atomist inclination is more stressed. Renaissance Meteorology, Pomponazzi to Descartes (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 135–147.

15.Merleau-Ponty, La nature, 26, 31.

16.Letter from October 2017, sent to Plempius to forward to his critique Fromondus, T I 402–409. As Descartes scholars have noted, Principles of Philosophy describes a methodological movement from presenting scientific “suppositions” in the Meteorology and Optics, to deductions of cosmological principles in the third part of Principles. Nadler, Philosopher, the Priest and the Painter, 122–124.

17.Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 41, image 414.

18.Descartes, Meteorology, 283 AT VI, 260.

19.Descartes witnessed avalanches himself (Meteorology, 325) but also retold stories of augeries and supernatural phenomena.

20.Descartes speaks about this rapture as “wonder,” Meteorology, 263, AT VI, 231.

21.Descartes to Huygens, July 15, 1636, AT I, 611. He sometimes calls for a good “artisan”—craftsman—and a mathematician, indicating that “painter” and “artisan” are not widely distinct here. See, for instance, the letter from Huygens to Descartes, June 15, 1636, AT

I, 344. Van Schooten also made the figures for Principles of Philosophy; Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 214, 300.

22.Descartes to Mersenne, March 1636, AT I, 339.

23.Descartes to Mersenne, January 1630, AT I, 492.

24.“A painter cannot represent all the different sides of a solid body equally well on his flat canvas, and so he chooses one of the principle ones, sets it facing the light, and shades the others so as to make them stand out only when viewed from the persoective of the chosen side. In just the same way, fearing that I could not put everything I had in my mind into my discourse, I undertook merely to expund quite fully what I understood about light.” Discourse on Method, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 132, AT VI, 42–43.

25.Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel contenant generalement tous les mots françois, tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts (1690).

26.Descartes to Mersenne, January 1630 AT I, 492.

27.This is the case throughout in the translation of Meteorology; see, for instance, AT VI where Descartes speaks of “figures & grosseurs,” which in English becomes shapes and sizes. Meteorology, 264, AT VI, 232.

28.Cf. The translation into “diagram” in http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1619_1.pdf.

29.Sepper, Descartes Imagination, 51.

30.Sybille Krämer, “Epistemology of the Line. Reflections on the Diagrammatical Mind”, in Alexander Gerner and Olga Pombo (Eds.), Studies in Diagrammatology and Diagram Praxis (London: College Publications, 2010), 13–38.

31.Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l´Ontologie Grise de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1981), 116–118.

32.Descartes, rule twelve in Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 38–40, AT X, 413. See also the discussion on figures of rhythm further below.

33.Descartes, rule nine in Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 33, AT X, 400.

34.Descartes, rule twelve in Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 43, AT X, 417.

35.Dennis Sepper has shown that Descartes’s early notion of figures, for instance in the Compendium on Music, precedes his later metaphysics and therefore cannot be reduced to “ideas” of the mind, or representation. Figures can be conceived as parts of the whole, as minimal modes of representation, but they also refer to some kind of sensible experience—“all figuration requires activity—the minumum of which is like conceiving figures mentally or sizing up an object in a glance.” Descartes Imagination, 51.

36.Cf. As Sybille Krämer (“Epistemology of the Line: Reflections on the Diagrammatical Mind,” in Studies in Diagrammatology and Diagram Praxis, ed. Alexander Gerner and Olga Pombo [London: College Publications, 2010], 13–38) has argued, Descartes transforms geometry into a figurative “language of the eye” that not only represents the objects but constitutes them; the objects arise through the operation.

37.Descartes, rule fifteen in Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 65, AT X, 452.

38.Cf. Raz Chen-Moris and Ofer Gal, Baroque Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 238.

39.Descartes to Mersenne, March 1636, AT I, 340, translation of author. A translation using “shapes” rather than figures is to be found in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 51.

40.Gassendi was angry not to have been quoted on this phenomena, which Descartes took from Reneri. According to Rodis-Lewis (Descartes [Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995], 123–124), Descartes had decided to use this exceptional phenomenon for speculations on physics in general.

41.Descartes to Mersenne, March 1636, AT I, 340.

42.Susanna Berger has used this analogy in explaining the role of printed images in Descartes’s work. The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 184–186. Helen Hattab has also noted the use of art in Descartes’s physics, in conjunction with a move away from Aristotelian physics beginning from self-evident principles. Descartes assumes problems of physics to rest on geometrical forms, and he demonstrates this in his hypotheses of particles in the Meteorology. “Descartes Mechanical but Not Mechanistic Physics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, ed. Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) 127–137. Hattab also shows that the natural philosophy does not rest on theories of extended forms present in the Meditations: “Applying geometrical principles enables the derivation of many diverse effects,” 136.

43.René Descartes, Optics, in Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology, transl. Paul J Olscamp (Cambridge: Hackett, 2001), 90.

44.Alain Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, Tome I (Paris: 1691), 305.

45.Huygens to Descartes, October 28, 1635, AT I, 325–328.

46.This combination of skills also occurs in Descartes’s plan for an academy of the arts in Paris—the teachers were to know arts, mathematics, and physics. It may have never come to fruition, but it makes its mark on his work. AT XI, 659. See also Alain Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, Tome II, 433–434.

47.Descartes to Huygens, November 1, 1635, AT I, 331.

48.Descartes to Beeckman, April 23, 1619, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3, AT X, 157. As Dennis Sepper has shown, there is a direct link between Descartes’s concept of imagination—which Sepper sees as an overall key to his philosophy—and his use of figures. Therefore, there is a natural relation also between the figures of algebra and geometry and those of music, for instance. “Figuring Things Out: Figurate Problem-Solving in the Early Descartes,” in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, 238–239. Cf. also Sybille Krämer, Berechenbare Vernunft: Kalkül und Rationalismus im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1991), 169–220.

49.See note 38. One may, as Dennis Sepper has done, confer the intelligibility of the universe to “analogies” of a divine source, which is also what makes algebra meaningful despite its lack of object. “Figuring Things Out: Figurate Problem-Solving in the Early Descartes,” in Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, 245.

50.Zittel has pointed this out, Theatrum Philosophicum Descartes, 206–208.

51.Descartes to Huygens, June 11, 1636, AT I, 605–606.

52.Huygens to Descartes, June 15, 1636, AT I, 344, 607.

53.Descartes to Mersenne, May 25, 1637, AT I, 378. Particles of different shapes and sizes are “never so well arrranged, nor so exactly joined together, that there do not remain many spaces around them.” Descartes, Meteorology, 264, AT VI, 232.

54.Cf. Douglas Jesseph “Hobbes and Descartes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism, ed. Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz, and Delphine Antoine-Mahut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 623–624.

55.According to Daniel Garber, Descartes’s notion of particulars develops over time and is used in different ways in different works. The essays are to be read and understood against Principles of Philosophy, where experience may lead up to conjectures of how things are constituted. The proof is then not measured against any notion of truth but rather how well it may work in future experiences and experimentation. Descartes Embodied: Reading

Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 122–127.

56.Descartes to Mersenne, January 9, 1639, AT I, 482–484.

57.Huygens to Descartes, October 28, 1635, AT I, 325–328.

58.Copy at Wrangelska biblioteket Roggebiblioteket, Strängnäs.

59.According to Christoph Lüthy (“Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion,” in Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa and Ian Maclean [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 99), the readers of Descartes’s own times may have thought of the images as proofs and the repetition would have underscored that.

60.Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, trans John B. Brough, The Collected Works of Husserl, vol. XI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 646–647.

61.Descartes to Golius, May 19, 1635, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 48–49, AT I, 318–320.

62.The English translation has “admirable,” Meteorology, 263. The French original “admirable,” however, is a concept that brings us to the passion of wonder, explored in Les Passions de l ´ame, Passions of the Soul.

63.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 52, AT XI, 373.

64.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 58, AT XI, 381.

65.Descartes, Meteorology, 361, AT VI, 366.

66.Descartes, rule twelve in Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 49–50, AT X, 426–428.

67.Brown has argued that there is a difference between the specific practice of the Wunderkammer and the scientific ideals that were equally explored in Descartes, arguing that wonder may both raise the desire to acquire new knowledge and free us from “bad theories”: “The test of a good theory is how well it unlocks the secrets and marvels of nature and frees us from wonder.” Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 145–150.

68.Craig Martin, Renaissance Meteorology, 127. As Martin has shown, “wonder” was a much used concept in renaissance meteorology, 132–134.

69.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 89, AT VIIIA.

70.Descartes to Reneri, June 2, 1631, AT I, 205.

71.Descartes, Meteorology, 264, AT VI, 232.

72.Descartes, Meteorology, 299–301, AT VI, 281–285.

73.See, for instance, fig. 1, Descartes, Meteorology, 270, AT VI, 242.

74.Descartes to Huygens, October 30, 1636, AT I, 614. Unfortunately, van Schooten did not altogether succeed in following that through since Hobbes had reason to complain about the placement of an image in Optics; Hobbes to Mersenne for Descartes, March 30, 1641, AT III, 348.

75.Descartes to Huygens, October 30, 1636, AT I, 614. Translation by author.

76.For an essay that has captured the precise observations on the discourse on salt, see Roger Ariew, The A to Z of Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy, Roger Ariew et al. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2010), 179.

77.L’homme de Réne Descartes: Et un traitté de la formation du fotetus du mesme autheur. Avec les Remarques de Louys de la Forge sur le Traitté de l’homme de René Descartes; et sur les figures par luy inventées, Paris, 1664.

78.Descartes, Meteorology, 277–278, AT VI, 251–254.

79.Descartes, Meteorology, 275–276, AT VI, 249–251.

80.Descartes, Meteorology, 285, AT VI, 261–262.

81.Letter to Plempius, December 20, 1637, AT I, 475–477. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 77.

82.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 288, AT VIIIA, 326.

83.See for instance Zittel, who calls the images a kind of “morphological alphabet.” Theatrum Philosophicum Descartes, 241, 279.

84.Zittel, Theatrum Philosophicum Descartes, 299–300.

85.“It is in this twilight zone that Descartes illustration perform their illuminating function: where the indeterminacy of ‘clear and distinct ideas’ threatens to lead to an impasse, Descartes feeds the outer eye, and thanks to it the recipient mind, with a type of ‘clarity’ whose epistemological source is excitingly unclear.” Lüthy, “Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion,” 126. “The clarity and distinctness of the illustration serve to hide the problems in the argument, which is about as circular as the sling’s motion,” 111. Through the drawings, Descartes becomes what he is not: a mechanical atomist, Lüthy argues, 124.

86.After Descartes, speculations on atoms and particles became very popular in the 1660–1670s, leading to such reductionism. Lüthy, “Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion,” 131.

87.Descartes, Meteorology, 321, AT VI, 311.

88.Descartes, rule twelve, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 41, AT X, 413–414.

89.Descartes, Meteorology, 339, AT VI, 336.

90.Descartes, Meteorology, 338, AT VI, 335.

91.Descartes, rule twelve, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 41, AT X, 413–414.

92.Descartes, rule twelve, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 40, AT X, 413.

93.SERRES.

94.Abrégé de musique in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jeanne-Marie Beyssade and Denis Kambouchner (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 149. This is also the way Descartes approaches affects in Passions of the Soul. The translation of Robert has “physicist.” Compendium on Music, 11, AT X, 89.

95.Descartes, Compendium on Music, 14–16. AT X, 95–96.

96.Mersenne to Descartes, December 1638, AT II, 465.

97.See Kasper Levin, Tone Roald, and Bjarne Sode Funch, “Visual Art and the Rhythm of Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77, no. 3, 281–293. The article argues that rhythm is immanent to the aesthetic domain and that it gathers the senses and actualizes modes of absorption in perception and affect.

98.Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony Steinbock, The Collected Works of Husserl vol. IX (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 587.

99.See, for instance, Husserl, Phantasy, Image, Consciousness and Memory, 189–190.

100.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (London Routledge, 2008), 57.

101.Merleau-Ponty, World of Perception, 57–58.

102.Glen Mazis, Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 204.

103.Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 53.

104.She quotes Merleau-Ponty: “The contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry. If one outlines the shape of an apple with a continuous line, one makes an object of the shape, whereas the contour is rather the ideal towards which the sides of the apple recede in depth. / . . . / That is why Cezanne follows the swelling in modulating colors and indicates several outlines in blue.” Through Wiskus, Rhythm of Thought, 55.

105.Cf. Jamie Lorimer, “Aesthetics for Post-Human Worlds: Difference, Expertise and Ethics,” Dialogues in Human Geography 2, no. 3 (2013): 284–287.

106.Descartes, rule fourteen, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 62, AT X, 446.

107.Descartes, Compendium on Music, 14–15, AT X, 95.

108.Descartes, Compendium on Music, 51–52, AT X, 140–141.

109.Descartes, rule ten, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 35, AT X, 404.

110.In this context I differ from Lüthy who says that Descartes first argues for an unimaginable res extensa, and then that he attempts to prove the solidity of the res extensa. As I have wanted to argue, the res extensa has a solidity that is not imagined, but figured—that is, made accessible through the senses. Cf. Lüthy, “Where Logical Necessity Becomes Visual Persuasion.”

111.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 288, AT VIIIA, 325–326.

112.As Daniel Garber has remarked, the essays do not provide a natural philosophy where a knowledge of certainty is presented; instead, we are confronted with hypothesis concerning the nature of light, water, wind, and so on. Only in the eighth discourse in Meteorology, on the rainbow, is Discourse on Method referenced. Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 45–46.

113.Note quoted through Renaud Barbaras, “Merleau-Ponty and Nature,” Research in Phenomenology 31, no. 1 (2001): 22–38.

114.Barbaras, “Merleau-Ponty and Nature,” 31.

115.With Descartes begins “the modern appropriation of feeling by thinking,” Mario Perniola (The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic, trans. Massimo Verdicchio [London: Continuum, 2005], 8) argues, who sees that the mind-body dualism is not the most central problem but rather the “thing” that thinks beyond all substances.

116.Descartes, Meteorology, 321, AT VI, 311.

117.René Descartes, Compendium on Music, 14–15, AT X, 95–96.

118.Descartes rule twelve, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 39, AT X, 411.

5. Thinking through Lines with Descartes

1.See Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art (Cambridge: Chadwick-Healey, 1977). Baltrušaitis has in this book a chapter on Descartes, where he shows Descartes’s interests in anamorphic or paradoxical perspective in connection with his thoughts on the automata, illusionary machines, optical illusions, toys, and constructions that produce extravagant and unnatural foreshortenings, optical diversions, flourishing tremendously at that time. See ibid., 61–70.

2.A. De Rosa, Perspective, Catoptric and Artificial Magic, ed. by Jean François Nicéron. With critical editions of La Perspective Curieuse (Paris, 1638) and of the Thaumaturgus Opticus (Paris, 1646), (Roma: Aracne edizioni, 2013).

3.In a letter to Mersenne dated April 30, 1639, AT II, 539–540, Descartes tells Mersenne that he has received Niceron’s work and speaks of it with admiration.

4.Lucien Vinciguerra considers that anamorphosis is an image that suits better to Locke’s understanding of confused ideas. He quotes a passage from § 29 from Locke’s essays that reads: “The author takes anamorphosis for illusionary perspective that confuses the things for showing things. He does not consider that at stake here is indeed the movement of seeing and not in first place what is being showed.” See Lucien Vinciguerra, La représentation excessive: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Pascal (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013), 19–120.

5.Bossuet, “Sermon sur la providence,” prêché à Dijon, en la Sainte-Chapelle, le III^e dimanche après Pâques, 7 mai 1656, Texte établi et annoté par Bernard Velat, Yvonne Champailler in Sur la brièveté de la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 19–53. In English it reads:

When I consider in myself the arrangement of human things, confused, uneven, irregular, I often compare it to certain paintings that one finds quite usually in the libraries of the curious as a game of perspective. The first sight shows only shapeless features and a confused mixture of colors which seem to be either the trial of some apprentice or the play of some child rather than the work of a learned hand. But as soon as the one who knows the secret makes you look at it from a certain place, as soon as all the uneven lines come together in a certain way in our sight, all the confusion is unraveled, and you see a face appear with its lineaments and proportions, where it previously had no appearance of human form. It seems to me, Gentlemen, a rather natural picture of the world, of its apparent confusion and its hidden correctness, that we can never notice except by looking at it from a certain point that faith in Jesus Christ discovers.

6.Descartes, “Optics,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 213.

7.Descartes, AT X, 92, 94.

8.Jean Wahl, Du rôle de l’idée de l’instant dans la philosophie de Descartes (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1920): “c’est par un acte instantanée de la pensée que l’esprit pourra se délivrer de son doute.”

9.Descartes, “Conversation with Burman,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 333.

10.Descartes, “Conversation with Burman,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 335.

11.Descartes, “Conversation with Burman,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 335.

12.Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego sum, trans. Marie-Eve Morin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 23–24.

13.Descartes, “Optics,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 166.

14.Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1997), specially chapter 3, “A Shadow on the Painting,” 89–122.

15.André Gide, Journal 1889–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1948), 41, cf. Journals 1889–1949, trans. J. O’Brien (London: Penguin, 198), 30–31.

In a work of art, I rather like to find thus transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself. Nothing shed more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately. Thus, in paintings by Memling or Quentin Metzys, a small dark convex mirror reflects, in its turn, the interior of the room in which the action of the painting takes place. Thus, in a slightly different way, in Velazquez’ La Meninas. Finally, in literature, there is the scene in which a play is acted in Hamlet; this also happens in many other plays. In Wilhelm Meister, there are the puppet shows and the festivities in the castle. In The Fall of the House of Usher, there is the piece that is read to Roderick, etc. one of these examples is absolutely accurate. What would be more accurate, and what would explain better what I’d wanted to do in my Cahiers, in Narcisse and in La Tentative, would be a comparison with the device from heraldry that involves putting a second representation of the original shield “en abyme” within it.

16.Allain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963).

17.“Est mise en abyme toute enclave entretenant une relation de similitude avec l’eouvre qui la contient,” Lucien Dällenbach, Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la misen en abyme (Paris: editions du Seuil, 1977), 18, trans. Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes, The Mirror in the Text (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 8.

18.For a recent discussion of myse en abyme as central for post-Heideggerian philosophy, see Iddo Dickmann, The Little Crystalline Seed: The Ontological Significance of Mise en Abyme in Post-Heideggerian Thought (New York: SUNY Press, 2020).

19.Jean Wahl, Du rôle de l’idée de l’instant dans la philosophie de Descartes.

20.Jean Lafond, “Descartes philosophe et écrivain,” Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l’Etranger 182, no. 4 (1992): 421–438.

21.Durs Grünbein, Der Cartesische Taucher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008).

22.Cf. Bruno Clément, “La langue claire de Descartes,” Mis en ligne sur Cairn.info le 23/10/2009 https://doi.org/10.3917/rdes.065.0020.

23.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 113–114.

24.Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

25.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 151.

26.Descartes, AT VI, 41–42, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 132.

27.In the Dialogue Search for Truth, Descartes puts in the mouth of Epistemon the view that “the intellect is like an excellent painter who is called upon to put the finishing touches to a bad picture sketched out by a young apprentice. It would be futile for him to employ the rules of his art in correcting the picture little by little, a bit here and a bit there, and in adding with his own hand all that is lacking in it, if, despite his best efforts, he could never remove every major fault, since the drawing was badly sketched from the beginning, the figures badly placed, and the proportions badly observed.” “Search for Truth,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 406.

28.Nancy, Ego sum, Eng trans., 51.

29.In a much more general and different perspective, for an account about the relation between Descartes’s philosophical views and Poussin’s view on art and painting, see

Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, “Descartes et Poussin,” Boulletin de Société d’étude du XVII eme siècle 23 (1953): 520–549.

30.Descartes. “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 41.

31.Nancy, Ego sum, Eng. trans., 31.

32.Ibid. Nancy notes that calamus is an ancient reed pen and that Descartes’s portraying can be connected to Pascal’s words in Pensées § 347 that reads: “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.”

33.Paul Valéry, Cahiers / 21, 1938–1939 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1960), 164. Valéry speaks also of the oeil-tact in Cahiers / 29, 1944–1945 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1961), 435.

34.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 197.

35.AT I, 137–138.

36.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 185.

37.Jacques Derrida, Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 336, Eng. trans. Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2.

38.See, among others, Jonathan Rée, “Descartes’s Commedy,” in Philosophical Tales: An Essay on Philosophy and Literature (London: Methuen, 1987).

39.Maurice Muller, De Descartes à Marcel Proust (Paris: La Baconnière, 1947); Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, “Entre le rêve et la veille: Qui suis-je?” in Études théologiques et religieuses 80, no. 2 (2005): 201–214.

40.On the relation between Beckett and Descartes, see Edward Bizub, Beckett et Descartes dans l’œuf—Aux sources de l’œuvre beckettienne: de Whoroscope à Godot; and Helena Martins, “Words (mis)trusted” in Dis-orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity, ed. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Tora Lane (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 159–173.

41.Rée, Philosphical Tales.

42.AT VI, 4; I, 112.

43.AT XI, 31; I, 90.

44.Nancy, Ergo sum, 74.

45.Emile Benveniste, “Analytic Philosophy and Language,” in Problems of General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elisabeth Meck (Miami, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), I: 236; Nancy’s comments, Ego sum, 84–86. See also J.-M. Beyssade, La philosophie première de Descartes: le temps et la cohérence de la métaphysique (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 250–251, who points out how the cogito is not tacit but an autonomous moment in which its moment of articulation emerges.

46.Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 151.

47.Derrida, Eyes of the University, 317f.

48.Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: la Révolution française et les patois: l’enquête de Grégoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

49.Letter to Pere Vatier, January 24, 1638.

50.See also here Derrida, Eyes of the University, on Descartes’s thoughts on language.

51.This sounding connection between the French “je” (I) and the German “je,” each time, is at the core of several meditation of Jean-Luc Nancy on the “Je,” the “ego,” as pure utterance.

52.Rée, Philosophical Tales, 19.

53.Cit. in Rée, Philosophical Tales, 26.

54.Descartes 1596–1650; Shakespeare 1564–1616; Cervantes 1547–1616.

55.Pierre Guenancia, “Le modèle du théâtre chez Descartes,” Revue de métaphysique et de moral 2, no. 98 (2018): 199–214.

56.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 190.

57.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 190.

58.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 190.

59.Plato, 189 e, Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 12, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1921).

60.AT VIII, 7, Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, n.9, 195.

61.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I,

n.197, 284.

62.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I,

n.197, 284.

63.Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I,

n.197, 284.

64.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I,

n.70, 353.

65.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, n.79, 356.

66.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, n.79, 356.

6. The Gaze, Images, and Drives

1.Descartes, Meditations, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 15, AT VII, 22–23.

2.It has been pointed out by Alexander Schlutz (Mind’s World [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009], 36–80) that Descartes’s imagination resembles Aristotle’s phantasia: it entails the creation of mental representations of images and figures. It is the concept of imagination above all that offers a bridge between ancient systems of knowledge and modern conceptions of subjectivity. Here Descartes holds a key position.

3.Descartes, Meditations, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 13, AT VII, 19.

4.Descartes, Meditations, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 24, AT VII, 34.

5.Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1991), 106.

6.As Jacques Lacan has noted, Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1986), 141.

7.Dumont, Descartes et l´esthetique, 62–69.

8.Lacan, Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 44.

9.See, for instance, Mladen Dolar, “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconsious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 21.

10.Les Olympique, 22. The accuracy of these notes have been contested by Fernand Hallyn, Les Olympiques de Descartes (Genève: Librarie DROZ, 1995), 21.

11.Freud, “Some Dreams of Descartes’: A Letter to Maxime Leroy.” Standard Edition XXI, 203–204.

12.Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition IV–V (London: Hogarth, 1953), 32.

13.Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, SE V, 540.

14.Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, SE V 540.

15.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 43, AT XI, 362.

16.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 33, AT XI, 348.

17.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 31, AT XI, 346.

18.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 29, AT XI, 344–345.

19.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 33, AT XI, 348.

20.Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery, rev. Michael Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–190.

21.Descartes, Optics, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 165, AT VI, 113.

22.Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, 607.

23.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 33, AT XI, 348.

24.Descartes, Meditations, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 13, AT VII, 19–20.

25.Descartes, Optics, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 165, AT VI, 112.

26.Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 132.

27.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 30, AT XI, 345. As Pascal Dumont (Descartes et l´esthéthique: l´art d´emerveiller, 67–68) has pointed out, the images in dreams and imagination are both described as composites that derive from the activity of the mind, willful or not, but never from the external world. In this sense, they point to the existence of an “aesthetic faculty” in Descartes that he never fully develops.

28.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 29, AT XI, 345.

29.Imagination, to Descartes, does not equal the internal, synthesizing production of images that Kant describes in terms of Einbildungskraft in Critique of Pure Reason. Here, imagination is a “blind though indispensible function of the soul, which we are seldom even conscious.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B103, A78. Neither does it correspond to the joyful freeplay of the faculties presented in Critique of Judgement; it is rather conceived as an internal production of images by the will.

30.Descartes, Discourse on Method, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 114, AT VI, 7.

31.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 284, AT VIIIA, 320.

32.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 284, AT VIIIA, 320.

33.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 33, AT XI, 348.

34.As Schlutz (Mind’ World, 43–37) has pointed out, imagination consistently belongs to a lower faculty of the soul than the pure intellect in Descartes’s metaphysical writings. In Passions, however, it is not metaphysics that is at stake.

35.Descartes, rule twelve in Rules for the Direction of the Mind, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 42, AT X, 415.

36.Descartes, Treatise on Man, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 99, AT XI, 119. The introduction hints at a part of the manuscript being lost; the men “resembling us” are never introduced.

37.Renatus Des Cartes de Homine, figuris et latinitate donatus a Florentio Schuyl, vgdvni Batavorvm, apud Petrvm Leffen & Franciscvm Moyardvm, ed. (Paris: de Schuyl, 1662).

38.L’Homme de René Descartes et un traité de la formation de foetus avec remarques de Deforges sur le traitte de René Descartes et les figures par lui inventes, ed. Clerselier (Paris, 1664).

39.Cottingham, Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 1, 313.

40.Descartes, L’Homme, ed. Clerselier, 1664, 17–18.

41.Descartes, L’Homme, ed. Clerselier, 1664, figure 17.

42.See, for instance, Delphine Antoine-Mahut, “The Story of L’Homme,” in Descartes’ Treatise on Man and Its Reception, ed. Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Stephen Gaukroger (Cham: Springer International, 2016), 23.

43.Antoine-Mahut, “Story of L’Homme,” 23.

44.Descartes to Mersenne, December 1632, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 40, AT I, 263.

45.Descartes, Optics, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 164–167, AT VI, 109–128.

46.Descartes, Optics, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 167, AT VI, 130.

47.Descartes, Optics, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 132, AT VI, 42–43.

48.Descartes, Optics, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 165, AT VI, 113.

49.Cf. the reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “The Relations of the Soul and the Body and the Problem of Perceptual Consciousness,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 8, https://www.academia.edu/10572479/Merleau_Ponty_Eye_and_Mind_1961_.

50.Lacan, Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 87.

51.Joseph K Perloff, “Human Dissection and the Science and Art of Leonardo da Vinci,” American Journal of Cardiology 111 (2013): 775–777.

52.Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Guilia and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 284–299.

53.Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in The Standard Edition XI, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957), 65–66.

54.Freud, SE XI, 70–71.

55.Freud SE XI, 95.

56.Leonardo da Vinci, Skizzenbücher, ed. Anna Suh (London: Parragon, 2005), 136. Cf. Clerselier foreword.

57.Descartes, Description of the Human Body, The World and Other Writings 172, AT XI, 227.

58.Descartes, Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, 103, AT XI, 126.

59.Descartes, Description of the Human Body, The World and Other Writings, 187, AT XI, 253.

60.Descartes, Description of the Human Body, The World and Other Writings 193, AT XI, 265.

61.Descartes, Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings 102, AT XI, 124–125.

62.Lacan, Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 87.

7. The Thinking Fetus

1.See, for example, Freud’s brief “Some Dreams of Descartes: A Letter to Maxime Leroy.” SE 21, 203–204. In Freud’s reading the dreams appear to be “from above”—that is, intellectual dreams—rather than of associative content.

2.See, for instance, Mladen Dolar, “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconsious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 11–41; Joël Sipos, Lacan et Descartes, La tentation métaphysique (Paris: PUF, 1994), 275–306; Humphrey Morris, “Reflections of Lacan: His Origins in Descartes and Freud,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1988): 186–208; Adrianna M. Paliyenko, “Postmodern Turns Against the Cartesian Subject: Descartes ‘I,’ Lacan’s Other,” in Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, ed. Susan Bordo (Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 141–166.

3.Lewis S. Feuer (“Anxiety and Philosophy: The Case of Descartes,” American Imago 20, no. 4 [1963]: 417) performs an analysis of Cartesian “anxiety” with reference to these personal experiences, adding also that the often-commented section in Passions about a husband secretly feeling relief at his wife’s passing is referring to his father. See also Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (Descartes [Paris: Calmann-Lewy, 1995], 17–22) on the guilt associated with the maternal death.

4.Clerselier produced the 1664 illustrated edition of L’Homme that is included in the bigger work Le Monde. As Annie Bitbol-Hespériès (Descartes’ Treatise on Man and Its Reception, ed. Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Stephen Gaukroger [Cham: Springer International, 2016], 33) has shown, no script was found that carries the title La formation du foetus.

5.Descartes, Description of the Human Body, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 314, AT XI, 224.

6.Descartes, Description of the Human Body, The World and Other Writings, trans. Stephen Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 204, AT XI, 284.

7.Descartes, The Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, 150, AT X, 178; and The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 106, AT XI, 177.

8.Descartes, Optics, 100, AT VI, 128. See also Descartes to Mersenne, May 27, 1630, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 26, where Descartes expresses doubt on this matter, AT I, 153.

9.Descartes to Elisabeth, June 28, 1643, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 227–228, AT III, 691–694.

10.Arnauld, “Fourth Set of Objections,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 150, AT VII, 214.

11.Descartes, “Fourth Set of Replies,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 171–172, AT VII, 246.

12.Rebecka Wilkin (“Descartes, Individualism, and the Fetal Subject,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 [2008]: 96–127) has given an account of the exchange from this point of view, arguing that accounts of Descartes’s argumentations concerning the fetus underline his overall argument that we usually, in our everyday lives, perceive of ourselves as beings of both body and mind. The shock of Descartes’s considerations of the fetus, Wilkin (106) argues, historically related to his joining the idea of a biological entity and a thinking being—they had hitherto stemmed from two different ontologies and not been joined.

13.Arnauld, “Fifth Set of Objections,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 184, AT VII, 264.

14.Letter to Hyperaspistes, August 1641, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 189, AT III, 423.

15.Letter to Hyperaspistes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 190, AT III, 424.

16.Letter to Hyperaspistes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 189, AT III, 424.

17.Letter to Hyperaspites, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 190, AT III, 424.

18.Descartes, Conversation with Burman, trans. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 8.

19.Descartes, Conversation with Burman, 8.

20.Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 218, AT VIII 8A, 35. See also Letter to Hyperaspites, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 189, AT III, 424.

21.Descartes, Conversation with Burman, 8.

22.Descartes, Conversation with Burman, 8. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 190, AT III, 424.

23.Descartes to De Launey, July 22, 1641, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 188, AT III, 420.

24.As André Gombray (“Sigmund Descartes?” Philosophy 83, no. 325 [2008]: 301) has noted, Freud and Descartes differ in the sense that Descartes does not find the mind of the child to be deficient in any way.

25.Marion, On the Passive Thought of Descartes, 139–140.

26.Lilli Alanen (Descartes’s Concept of Mind [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003], 64–65) has an interpretation of “confused thoughts” in Descartes that pertains to emotional cognition rather than psychic life. She describes the passions originating in the body as modes of thought, and the kind of knowledge that the passions may produce as inherently confused, since it belongs to the hybrid domain situated between body and mind.

27.Lilli Alanen (Descartes’s Concept of Mind [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003], 172–178) has argued that passions in Descartes are modes of the mind, or thoughts, caused by modes of the body, and that Descartes implies that we may never assert the relation between body and mind through philosophical means. This, in turn, is a philosophical statement; individual histories will determine the way in which affects are produced and received in each unique person.

28.Descartes to Elisabeth, May 1646, AT IV, 407–413.

29.See John Sutton, “Controlling the Passions: Passion, Memory and the Moral Philosophy of the Self in Seventeenth Century Neurophilosophy,” in The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (London: Routledge 1998), 147–165.

30.Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80–96.

31.Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” SE I, 358–59.

32.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 28, AT XI, 342.

33.Correspondence with Elisabeth of Boehmen, Passions of the Soul, 17. Descartes’s notions of physiology in this work and others, such as de L’homme, were on the one hand inspired by physiological models such as Harvey’s, but it also came to hold a canonical position in the teaching of medicine in Holland, and was widely spread within the scientific community in Europe. Koch, Aesthetic Body, 28–33.

34.Descartes, Meditations, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 56–57, AT VII, 81–83.

35.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 32, AT XI, 346–348.

36.Alanen has seen that the Cartesian account of passions is attached to an immediate somatic effect on the body; what we see makes us act and behave in a certain way. As perceptions, they are not object to judgment. See “The Psycho-Physiology of Passions,” Descartes’s Concept of Mind, 183–185.

37.Descartes’s Conversation with Burman, 8; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 190, AT III, 424.

38.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 308, AT IV, 605.

39.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 306, AT IV, 60. See discussion by Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 262–263.

40.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 306, AT IV, 602; Denis Kambouchner, “La subjectivité cartésienne et l’amour.” in Les passions à l’âge classique: Théories et critiques des passions II, ed. P. F. Moreau (Paris: PUF, 2006), 77–97; Alberto Frigo, “A Very Obscure Definition: Descartes’s Account of Love in the Passions of the Soul and Its Scholastic Background,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24, no. 6 (2016): 1097–1116.

41.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 308, AT IV, 606.

42.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307, AT IV, 602.

43.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 308, AT IV, 602.

44.Descartes to Elisabeth, May 1646, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 286, AT IV, 409.

45.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 77, AT XI, 408.

46.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 308, AT IV, 605.

47.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 62, AT XI, 387.

48.Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works (London: Virago, 1988), 306.

49.Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation, 326.

50.Klein, “Weaning,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, 295.

51.Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” SE I, 358–359.

52.Klein, “Weaning,” 294.

53.Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” 308.

54.Klein, “A Contribution to the Psycho-Genesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in Love, Guilt and Reparation, 263; “Weaning,” 295.

55.Klein, Envy and Gratitude (London: Tavistock, 1957), 32.

56.Descartes, Passions of the Soul 74, AT XI, 409.

57.Descartes to Elisabeth of Bohemia, May 1646, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 286, AT IV, 408.

58.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307, AT IV, 604.

59.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 62, AT XI, 387.

60.Klein, Love Guilt and Reparation, 190.

61.Freud SE VII, 182.

62.Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, SE VII, 197.

63.Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Seminar X, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 177–178, 183.

64.Descartes, The World, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 82, AT XI, 6; Cf. Freud SE XI, 107.

65.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307, AT IV, 603.

66.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 308, AT IV, 606. Cf. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 62–63, AT XI, 388.

67.Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” SE XIV, 122.

68.Descartes, Description of the Human Body, The World and Other Writings, 198, AT XI, 274.

69.Descartes, Description of the Human Body, The World and Other Writings, 194, AT XI, 266.

70.Descartes, The Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, 141, AT X, 167.

71.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 305–314, AT IV, 601–617.

72.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 77, AT XI, 407.

73.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 77, AT XI, 408.

74.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 61, AT XI, 387.

75.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 61, AT XI, 387.

76.Descartes, Treatise on Man, The World and Other Writings, 104, AT XI, 128.

77.John Sutton identifies the spirits as the radically new element in the Cartesian psycho-physiology, which was otherwise based upon renaissance theories of bodies that were fluid and permeable at large. Gaukroger et al., Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, 700–705.

78.Letter to Hyperaspites, Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 190, AT III, 424–425.

79.Letter to Hyperaspites, Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 190, AT III, 424.

80.Descartes, Conversation with Burman, 8.

81.Letter to Hyperaspites, August 1641, Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 190, AT III, 424.

82.John Sutton, “The Body and the Brain,” Gaukroger et al., Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, 699.

83.Freud SE VII, 182.

84.Freud SE VII, 182.

85.Freud SE VII, 175.

86.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 608, AT IV, 606.

87.Descartes, “Fourth Set of Replies,” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 171–172, AT VII, 246–247.

88.This has been noted by Cottingham (Philosophy and the Good Life [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], 92), who sees in Descartes a new route for the “therapy” of passions; the “physicien” of passions does not avoid them but sorts them by reason.

89.AT IV, 407–413, Descartes to Elisabeth, May 1646, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 285–288. See the discussion of Alanen, Descartes’s Concept of Mind, 165–171.

90.Descartes to Elisabeth, May 1646, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 286, AT IV, 408.

91.Descartes to Elisabeth, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 286, AT IV, 408.

92.Descartes to Chanut, June 6, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 336, AT V, 150.

93.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 28, 43, AT XI, 342, 362.

94.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 43, AT XI, 362.

95.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 43, AT XI, 362.

96.Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV–V, 537–541. Freud describes the dream thought apparatus as a kind of accumulated resource of traces of perceptions rendered unconscious, that through certain association and stimulations might become preconscious and result in a motor discharge.

97.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 91, AT XI, 429.

98.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 91, AT XI, 429.

99.Chanut to Descartes, May 11, 1647, AT V, 21.

100.Descartes to Chanut, June 6, 1647, AT V, 57, Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 322. Henri F. Ellenberger (The Discovery of the Unconscious [New York: Basic, 1970], 523) mentions this letter, as referring to an “unconscious or half-conscious memory.”

101.Descartes, Passions of the Soul, 6, AT XI, 396.

102.Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation, 326.

103.Freud SE VII, 222.

104.Descartes to Chanut, February 1, 1647, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 308, AT IV, 606.

105.Mladen Dolar, “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 11–41.

106.Jean-Luc Marion, “The Originary Otherness of the Ego: A Re-reading of Descartes’s Second Meditation,” in On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions, trans. Christina Geschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 27.

107.Lacan, Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 168, 270–71.

108.Christia Mercer, “Descartes’ Debt to Teresa of Ávila, or Why We Should Work on Women in the History of Philosophy,” Philosophical Studies 174, no. 10 (2017): 2539–2555.

109.Descartes to Elisabeth, October/November 1646, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 296–297, AT IV, 528–530.

110.Descartes, Meditations, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes II, 20, AT VII, 29.

111.Marion, On the Ego and on God, 12.

112.Marion, On the Ego and on God, 27.

113.Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch II, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (München: Piper 2002), 761.

8. The Love between Body and Soul

1.Jean-Marie Beyssade, “Philosopher par lettres,” introduction to Descartes, Correspondance avec Elisabeth et autres lettres (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 23.

2.Jean-Marie Beyssade, “Philosopher par lettres,” introduction to Descartes, Correspondance avec Elisabeth et autres lettres, 25.

3.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 310.

4.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 306.

5.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 306.

6.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 306.

7.Nancy, Ergo sum, 55.

8.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 306–307.

9.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307.

10.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307.

11.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307.

12.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307.

13.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307.

14.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 307.

15.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 6 June 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 322.

16.Horatius Flaccus Q. Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica [Elektronisk resurs]. Rev. and repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929 [1926], II, ii, 79.

17.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 309.

18.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 309.

19.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 310.

20.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 310.

21.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 6 June 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III.

22.Ibid., III, 322.

23.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 312, 313.

24.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 313.

25.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 313.

26.Quoted by Descartes in “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 313.

27.Descartes, “Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 314.

28.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 329.

29.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 340.

30.Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes I, 364.

31.About Descartes’s views on involuntary bodily movements and their connection to the concept of bodily reflex, see Goerges Canguilhem, La Formation du Concept de Réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: PUF, 1955).

32.Descartes, Description of the Human Body.

33.Descartes, AT XI, 124.

34.Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

35.Marguerite Duras, Écrire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); “Ma chambre n’est pas un lit, ni ici, ni à Paris, ni à trouville. C’est une certaine fenêtre, une certaine table, des habitudes d’encre noire, de marques d’encres noires introuvables, c’est une certaine chaise,” 15.

36.Duras, Écrire, 32.

37.La Feuille Blanche, English translation of The Blank Sheet.

En vérité, une feuille blanche

Nous déclare par le vide

Qu’il n’est rien de si beau

Que ce qui n’existe pas.

Sur le miroir magique de sa blanche étendue,

L’âme voit devant elle le lieu des miracles

Que l’on ferait naître avec des signes et des lignes.

Cette présence d’absence surexcite

Et paralyse à la fois l’acte sans retour de la plume.

Il y a dans toute beauté une interdiction de toucher,

Il en émane je ne sais quoi de sacré

Qui suspend le geste, et fait l’homme

Sur le point d’agir se craindre soi-même.

38.Descartes, “Letter 21 May 1643,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 217.

39.Descartes, “Letter 21 May 1643,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 217.

40.Etienne de La Boétie uses the verb s’entr’aimer in his De la Servitude Volontaire, “ils ne s’entr’aiment pas, mais ils s’entrecraignent; ils ne sont pas amis; mais ils sont complices,” in Les Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2002), 180. Corneille employs this verb in his piece Attila III, 4: “Et si ressembalnce est par où l’on s’entr’aime. J’ai lieu de vous aimer comme un autre moi-même.”

41.Descartes, “Letter 1 February 1647,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes III, 311.