3
The theoreticism of the Cartesian cogito has mesmerized and hypnotized Western modernity. By
identifying my being/existence or interbeing/coexistence with what I think of it, the cogito
valorizes that mind which is at once disembodied, monologic, and ocularcentric/panoptic. As it
is the activity of the mind as “thinking substance” (res cogitans), the cogito is inherently
monologic because it is always and necessarily ego cogito – the epitome of an “invisible man”
who is isolated from others, both other minds and other bodies.
6
It is indeed cogito ergo non-
sum. We live in the company of others: “to be alone,” Tzvetan Todorov puts it with elegance,
“is no longer to be.”
7
Once the self and the other are viewed as disembodied substances (res),
two self-contained substances, monologism or even solipsism in extremis is inevitable. For
Descartes, moreover, the mind as cogito erects and monumentalizes the privtalized, insulated,
and echoless chamber of “clear and distinct ideas” (three visual terms) in which nobody else is
allowed to live. The self-imposed mind is incarcerated in the prison-house of epistemocratic
Panopticon. As a matter of fact, Cartesian panoptic metaphysics goes eyeball to eyeball with the
monologism of the cogito because vision or sight is not only isolating and distancing but also
anaesthetic in denying the sociability of the senses: there is indeed a narcissism and social
amnesia of and in Cartesian panopticism. To put it simply, there is an identity between the “I”
and the “eye.” The cogito is then really video ergo sum, or the mind’s I is the mind’s eye. It is a
scopic regime which undermines and scandalizes sociality – the sociality of the senses on the one
hand and of other humans and other things both living and nonliving on the other. Heidegger
contends that the “I” (or the “eye”) of the cogito becomes the center of thought from which the
“I-viewpoint” and the subjectivism of modern thought originate: “the subjectivity of the subject
is determined by the ‘I-ness’ (Ichheit) of the ‘I think.’” For him, the “I-viewpoint” of the
Convention