I must say that my experience reading Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, especially his book Ego sum, has been enlightening, not least because it reminds me of a reading that fascinated me at the time, Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
Although the books are about different authors, they both feel like a kind of false essay — the kind Klossowski has accustomed us to — as the point of both seems to be directed towards an infinite destination, where the circle becomes vicious, and ideas repeat themselves under other names, where the spirit manifests itself through the flame of knowledge, where “light comes from chaos”[1].
The common point in both the book Ego sum and in Nietzsche and the vicious circle is a rhizome between writing and painting, linked to philosophy.
One of Nancy’s outstanding elements is to propose a different perspective about René Descartes’ famous phrase “cogito ergo sum”, which in English we have heard translated as “I think, therefore I am”, however, Nancy carries out a meticulous reading of Descartes’ work, in which he relies mainly on the meditations, reaching the conclusion that thought is not what gives us the capacity to exist, because thought is a simulacrum, thought is assimilated to a painting as Lessing would say, or a Tableaux vivants as Pierre would say, for Nancy, the phrase cogito ergo sum, would come to mean: “I interpret, therefore I am”, because what we see (we think), is a series of interpretations that pass through the brain and are projected as a moving painting in our mind. However, thinking or interpreting requires the vision that interprets and gives us the capacity to believe [videor] in order to make the cogito [thinking [interpreting]]:
Videor: I have the appearance, I seem, I am seen. I appear insofar as I am seen — and I am seen as having the appearance of seeing. The videor secures the cogito, for it testifies to the very presence that the most radical doubt cannot diminish: videor is maintained, even in the midst of phantasmagoria, even in the midst of illusion. To have the appearance is to make illusion. The videor is the illusion which, by means of a perversion or an unheard-of perception, clarifies certainty in the abyss of illusion, the place of the videor is in fact painting the portrait, the most factitious and at the same time the most faithful of faces, the most blind and the most clairvoyant eye.[2]
Finally, we interpret a world that is unveiled before our eyes, creating visual paintings that remain — possibly — in suspension when our gaze is absent, believing in a truth generated by a matrix. Reality is rendered before our eyes, and we interpret, then exist in the observer.
Is it possible to exist in solitude, or do we exist only when we are interpreted by the observer [voyeur]?
The body is the extension of the soul to the extremities of the world and to the ends of itself, the one in the other intricate and indistinctly distinct, extension stretched until it breaks.[3]
René Descartes would say: “you exist and you know that you exist, and you know it because you know that you doubt. But you who doubt everything and cannot doubt yourself, who are you?”[4]
The observer is an interpreter of simulations.
I [ — “(‘ am not’)” — ] am.
[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego sum, Anthropos, España, 2007, p.64.
[2] Ibid. p. 55.
[3] Ibid. p. 144.
[4] Descartes quoted by Nancy, Ibid. p.103.
