The Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time (Reading Descartes with Jean-Luc Nancy)

“The Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time” explicates Nancy’s radical and foundational rereading of Descartes, first in the 1978 monograph, Ego sum, then over the course of the rest of Nancy’s work. Nancy reads Descartes’s cogito as a singular plural event whose “truth” requires its incessant reiteration “each and every time.” This sense of a performative or “iterative” cogito, finitely limited or interrupted by its singular (st)uttering, means that it must be endlessly repeated to be “true.” The analysis enabled by this perspective opens a set of figures that will stake out the senses of the scene of writing, of philosophy’s self-presentation, of world-making or “fabling,” and of corporal areality. All of these emerge in later works as prominent concerns of Nancy’s capacious philosophical attention. Most importantly, Nancy effectively questions received assumptions about the duality of mind and body in Descartes by unraveling the ways in which thinking and perceiving, meaning and sensation, are differing but interrelated forms of cogitation, differing kinds of sense-making as a practice of difference.