Past to Present

I love looking through writings I have documented in the past and finding new understandings within them and new connections to my current thoughts and ideas ....

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London, 1985, pp. 324-325

This double movement proper to the modern cogito explains why the ‘I think’ docs not, in its case, lead to the evident truth of the ‘I am’. Indeed, as soon as the T think’ has shown itself to be embedded in a density throughout which it is quasi-present, and which it animates, though in an equivocal semi-dormant, semi-wakeful fashion, it is no longer possible to make it lead on to the affirmation ‘I am’. For can I, in fact, say that I am this language I speak, into which my thought insinuates itself to the point of finding in it the system of all its own possibilities, yet which exists only in the weight of sedimentations my thought will never be capable of actualizing altogether? Can I say that I am this labour I perform with my hands, yet which eludes me not only when I have finished it, but even before I have begun it? Can I say that I am this life I sense deep within me, but which envelops me both in the irresistible time that grows side by side with it and poses me for a moment on its crest, and in the imminent time that prescribes my death? I can say, equally well, that I am and that I am not all this; the cogito does not lead to an affirmation of being, but it does lead to a whole series of questions concerned with being: What must I be, I who think and who am my thought, in order to be what I do not think, in order for my thought to be what I am not? What is this being, then, that shimmers and, as it were, glitters in the opening of the cogito, yet is not sovereignly given in it or by it? What, then, is the connection, the difficult link, between being and thought? What is man’s being, and how can it be that that being, which could so easily be characterized by the fact that ‘it has thoughts’ and is possibly alone in having them, has an ineradicable and fundamental relation to the unthought? A form of reflection is established far removed from both Cartesianism and Kantian analysis, a form that involves, for the first time, man’s being in that dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it.

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Gilles Delueze, Kant‘s Critical Philosophy, Minneapolis, 1984, pp. viii-ix

In one sense, Kant goes further than Rimbaud. For Rimbaud‘s famous formula ‘I is another‘ relates back strangely to an Aristotelian way of thinking: ‘Too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin! if the copper wakes up a bugle, that is not its fault‘ . .. For Rimbaud, it is thus a question of the determining form of a thing in so far as it is distinguished from the matter in which it is embodied: a mould as in Aristotle. For Kant, it is a question of the form of time in general, which distinguishes between the act of the I, and the ego to which this act is attributed: an infinite modulation, no longer a mould. Thus time moves into the subject, in order to distinguish the Ego from the lin it. It is the form under which the I affects the ego, that is, the way in which the mind affects itself. It is in this sense that time as immutable form, which could no longer be defined by simple succession, appeared as the form of interiority (inner sense), whilst space, which could no longer be defined by coexistence, appeared for its part as the form of exteriority. ‘Form of interiority‘ means not only that time is internal to us, but that our interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end. A giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time.