Reading Descartes Otherwise

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in Descartes’ Meditations—namely the blind the mad the dreamy and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity.Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism” the book’s series of close creatively critical readings of Descartes’ signature images brings the dramatic forces moments and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. The author patiently unravels the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes the father of modern philosophy”—a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere. In the process she revitalizes and reframes the legacy of Cartesian modernity in a way more mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces.