A Zeroing in on a Point Again: Placing Descartes’ Chaogito in the Age of Instantaneous Global-Material Portability
The Fable of the Invention of the World included its material cogito, its chaogito, situated at the extreme, in other words, initial point of fiction … Chaos - I am. I am - chaos. (Jean-Luc Nancy (1978), “Mundus est Fabula”)
Where can the cogitational core of Cartesian philosophy be “placed” today, if not replaceable?—and how? Or why Descartes all over again now? Does he not seem dead to you, I mean, already “pretty” dead, so to speak? Well, indeed, what was I thinking? Or what was I thinking?—precisely, as that old hat might ask himself again at this point.
So: Descartes may not be where we think he is, despite our various attempts at burying his legacy thus critically paternalized, now much maligned even when recycled. After all this time, is there still anything worth saving in this black hole, “abstract ego” (Hegel) of good old Cartesian consciousness? Really? Yes, in a way; insofar as, here, the Cartesian mind (l’espirit) functions as the self-sustaining “pool” (Francis Jacques, 1982) of “the fugitive present of thought’s own inscription” (Jonathan Rée, 1987). If, as I will try to show, Descartes’ thinking thing, res cogitans, remains alive—surviving the postmodern decentralization/deterritorialization of the big-ego-subjectivity of the self-imperializing I often too quickly and hastily equated with the “Cartesian” I—it/he is, I am also going to try to show, with us right now, right here, endlessly. If locatable at all today, this thinker, this figure of irreducible thinking, is to be approached temporally, rhythmo-topically, the Cartesian now-point being a radical tautology of time turning on itself, the “zero-point” zeroing on itself.
What interests me is this temporal topology and dramaturgy, rather than just ontology or geometry, of the Cartesian phenomenology of spirit, its radiological embodiment. What I explore below is just that, some strands of the Cartesian spirit of “methodological” thinking “degree zero” thus convertible as such, however fugitive or elliptical, chaotic, messy, in fact; I am (thinking) into that drive, almost spiritual, that drive toward analytic geometry, almost unchecked, the very ideational impulse behind the fabrication of the world now, for instance, mapped out and remodeled by the so-called GPS (Global Positioning System). At its origin, at its very moment of a world (of the mind) engineering and bureaucratizing itself, we detect a kind of subterranean world of mini-, perpetual travelers, elastic, self-inventing, self-unsettlingly mobile squatters of, again, the “zero” point that itself remains verbal and idiomatized rather than noun-ized or unionized. We will discover such fugitively momentous “zero” points of self-temporalization by working our way through some of the key transitional passages in Descartes’ Oeuvre, both well-known and lesser known, ranging
from the Rules, Discourse on Method, Meditations, etc. to the very last work, the Passions of the Soul.
There is a twist of space between the front arm and the back arm. Time goes there.… In the sense of being that it is a new feeling, it is more like a coincidence of focus, where time is. (Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (1993), “Ideal”)
Kyoo Lee, the author, most recently, of Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy and Bad (Fordham University Press, 2012), is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, where she teaches courses in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory and Gender Studies. She publishes widely in the intersecting fields of the theoretical Humanities such as Aesthetics, Asian American Studies, Comparative Literature/Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Critical Race theory, Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Feminist Philosophy, Gender Studies, Poetics, Post-phenomenology, and Translation.