Ego Sum - by Jean-Luc Nancy (Paperback)

About the Book

Ego Sum proposes a provocative and unprecedented reading of Descartes. By paying attention to mode of presentation of Descartes's philosophy, Nancy challenges our common understanding of the Cogito and shows how Descartes's ego is not the self-certain, self-transparent Subject of metaphysics but a mouth that opens to utter: ego sum.

Book Synopsis

First published in 1979 but never available in English until now, Ego Sum challenges, through a careful and unprecedented reading of Descartes's writings, the picture of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy: the thinker who founded the edifice of knowledge on the absolute self-certainty of a Subject fully transparent to itself. While other theoretical discourses, such as psychoanalysis, have also attempted to subvert this Subject, Nancy shows how they always inadvertently reconstituted the Subject they were trying to leave behind.

Nancy's wager is that, at the moment of modern subjectivity's founding, a foundation that always already included all the possibilities of its own exhaustion, another thought of "the subject" is possible. By paying attention to the mode of presentation of Descartes's subject, to the masks, portraits, feints, and fables that
populate his writings, Jean-Luc Nancy shows how Descartes's ego is not the Subject of metaphysics but a mouth that spaces itself out and distinguishes itself.

Review Quotes

Ego Sum is the most risky, and therefore most philosophically interesting, book concerning Descartes in the last forty years. Like Descartes's own philosophy, it remains contemporary.-- "Derrida Today"

About the Author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, as well as a respected commentator on art and culture. His wide-ranging thought is developed in books including Listening; Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity; Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body; Corpus; and Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality, all published by Fordham University Press.

Marie-Eve Morin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta in Canada. She is the author of Jean-Luc Nancy and co-editor of Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense.