It has been almost a decade—or two if I keep counting.

Reading, or otherwise sitting on, the work of René Descartes (March 31, 1596–February 11, 1650) with the quiet plea sure I see in a g(r)azing cow, I have been savoring, and saving somewhere, this nagging thought: His philosophy—his “Cartesianism,” his “rationalism,” his “methodological” doubt, his theoretical “self-centeredness,” his historicized him-ness—seems to remain overread and underexplored. I have been sensing that something else is going on, too, in those usual pages, in that familiar picture. And here, I am inviting you, my readers, to read with...

Let me flip open Descartes again.

My mind seems to have been actively suspended by certain constantly slippery gaps and cinematic interplays between the memory of my own first unschooled encounter with Descartes, the shock of theMeditations(1641) on the one hand, and the usual scholarly scenes of interpretation, or scholastic “filters” around that philosophical time bomb, on the other. As John Carriero put it,

CAN SOMEONE today take up a work of philosophy written over 350 years ago and engage with it on its own terms? This book is an attempt to do so with Descartes’Meditations concerning...

Where is René Descartes today—one who “lived, thought and died”?¹

“Descartes, a French national icon,”² once an epochalwunderkindand now nearly indistinguishable from the history of reading him, is for many scholars today a poster boy or a whipping boy, a hero or a villain: a “solipsist,” “narcissist,” “rationalist,” “idealist,” “reductionist,” “deductivist,” “dualist,” “closeted skeptic/atheist/materialist,” and so on. Biographically, compositionally, geographically, historically, politically, psychoanalytically, scientifically, theologically (etc., etc., etc.), he remains a fascinatingly troubling source for and a manifold index to modern philosophy and beyond. Everyone, thinker or not, as long as he or she is thinking, readily...

Indeed, “how easy it is to be mistaken” (s’y tromper) (O, 6:147/113), how easy it is to seethattruth: “How crystal clear everything would be in our philosophy if only we would exorcise these specters, make illusions or objectless perceptions out of them, brush them to one side of an unequivocal world!”¹ That is, Merleau-Ponty and I fantasize with Descartes, whose “Dioptricsis an attempt to do just that.”²

To have “clear and distinct” perceptions or ideas—to guard ourselves against falsities or fantasies as Descartes recommends—seems relatively easy. Tricky is the attempt itself.

For some evidence, we...

I know myself—save that knowledge.

In the four-page opening passage of chapter 2 of theHistory of Madness¹ and later in the essay “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,”² Michel Foucault launched a point-by-point self-defense against Derrida. Previously, in his forty-six page essay “TheCogitoand the History of Madness,”³ Derrida had pointed to some traces of Cartesianism ironically but unwittingly enacted by Foucault.

In that madness chapter of theHistory of Madness, Foucault advances an insightful point on Descartes’ thought-experiment in question, a passage that anyone who has taken Modern Philosophy 101 would readily recognize, perhaps too quickly....

An insatiable appetite for life: With this, we might understand, at least in part, why one dreams.

By “dream,” I mean both the projective kind, futural, as in “my dream is to become an American Idol,” and the retrospective kind, nocturnal, as in “I was a Kafka in my dream last night.” Either way, the dreamer can imagine, think, otherwise. For dream is an excess and a necessary excess that shapes desire. It knows neither bounds nor depths. Fulfilled, it immediately generates a higher level oftelosfrom within (e.g., Now I should become a Global Idol); interpreted, it leads...

“I don’t believe in God but I miss him,” says Julian Barnes.¹ “I don’t believe he exists but I dislike him anyway,” says Wendy Lesser.² While working on a project, the completion of which seems to take much longer than expected, Descartes says to his fiend Mersenne, “I too am too much in love with the fable of myWorldto give it up if God lets me live long enough to finish it; but I cannot answer for the future” (C, 1:179/3:28).

Why “but”? That is the question; explored here is a Cartesian version of those more or less...