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.