Abstract

Focusing on Descartes' strategy of fusing logical reasoning and figural thinking, this last chapter phenomenologizes the evil genius "argument" narratively. We see how and why the issue of the topographical virtuality of the Cartesian thinker, along with the persistent, referential ambiguity and circularity of "God," becomes mutually pressing, remaining unresolved in the moral teleology of Cartesian "faith." The Cartesian narrator's "zero-point" is then self-cornering or "cornered" (Bachelard). By implication, Cartesian reflection is forced to become inventive, insofar as it seeks to point beyond that which is ultimately thinkable. The new order of alterity re-established by this ambiguated time-time pushed to the edge of, and outside, time that instantly falls/fold back into the heart of time-becomes devoid of any content, without "inventory" (Bruns). Such is how the Cartesian mind's representational capacity becomes a purely positional fiction. Given that the Cartesian Good is God and vice versa by (co)extension, the reciprocity of which is conceptual rather than referential, the allegorical fate of Cartesian self-reflection rests on the ambiguous non-linearity or complexity-chaotic condition (Nancy), extractive resistance (Badiou) and responsorial position (Levinas)-of the reflective subject; almost eternalized therein would be the dramatic tension itself, which remains nameless or overnamed.

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