[n. The dependent and indeclinable subject.

]
In short, we are restoring a temporal thickness to the Cogito. If there
is no interminable doubt, and if “I think,” then this is because I throw
myself into provisional thoughts and because I overcome the discontinuities
of time by doing so. Thus vision runs headlong into a thing seen that
precedes it and that outlives it. Have we escaped this difficulty? We have
conceded that there is a solidarity between the certainty of vision and the
certainty of the thing seen. Given that the thing seen is never absolutely
certain (as is shown by illusions), must we conclude that vision too is
drawn into this uncertainty; or, given that vision is in itself absolutely
certain, must we conclude that the thing seen is also certain, and that I
can never be truly mistaken? The second solution would come down to
reestablishing the immanence that we rejected. But if we adopt the first
solution, thought would be cut off from itself and there would no longer
be anything but “facts of consciousness,” which may well be called
“inner” through a nominal definition, but which would remain for me
just as opaque as things. In other words, there would no longer be either
interiority or consciousness, and the experience of the Cogito would
once again be lost. When we describe consciousness engaged in a space
through its body, in a history through its language, or in its concrete
form of thought through its unquestioned beliefs, there is no question
of putting consciousness back into the series of objective events, not even
the series of “psychic events,” nor back into the causality of the world.
He who doubts cannot, while doubting, doubt that he doubts. Doubt –
even a generalized doubt – is not an annihilation of my thought, it is but
a pseudo-nothingness. I cannot escape being, my act of doubting itself
establishes the possibility of a certainty; my act is there for me, it keeps
me busy, I am engaged in it, and I cannot pretend to be nothing while I
accomplish this act. Reflection, which holds things at a distance, at least
discovers itself as given to itself in the sense that it cannot conceive of
itself as eliminated, it cannot hold itself at a distance from itself. But this
does not mean that reflection and thought are primitive facts that are simply
observed. As Montaigne had clearly seen, one can still question this
thought, which is loaded with historical sediments and weighed down
by its own being; one can have doubt about doubt itself, considered as a
definite modality of thought and as a consciousness of a doubtful object.
Moreover, the formula of radical reflection is not “I know nothing” – a
460
the cogito 421
formula that is all too easy to catch committing the flagrant offense of
contradiction – but rather: “What do I know?” Descartes did not forget
this. He is often credited with having overcome skeptical doubt, which is
only a state, by making doubt into a method, an act, and with having thus
found a fixed point for consciousness and for having restored certainty.
But in fact, Descartes did not bring doubt to an end in the face of the certainty
of doubt itself, as if the act of doubting was enough to obliterate
doubt and for certainty to prevail. He carried it further. He did not say “I
doubt, I am,” but rather “I think, I am,” and this signifies that doubt itself
is certain, not as actual doubt, but as the mere thought of doubting; and,
since we could say the same of this thought in turn, the only absolutely
certain proposition, the only one before which doubt stops – because
it is implicated by it – is “I think,” or again “something appears to me”
[quelque chose m’apparaît]. There is no particular act or experience that precisely
fills my consciousness and imprisons my freedom:
No thought is such that it destroys, and concludes, the power of thinking
– there is no given position of the bolt which closes the lock forever.
And there is no thought that is, for thought, a resolution born of
its very development, and like a final harmony from this permanent
dissonance.45
No particular thought reaches to the heart of our thought, nor is any
thought conceivable without another possible thought that witnesses
it. And this is not an imperfection from which we could imagine consciousness
freed. If there really is to be consciousness, if something is to
appear to someone, then an enclave, or a Self, must be carved out behind
all of our particular thoughts. I do not have to reduce myself to a series
of “consciousnesses,” and each of these consciousnesses, along with the
historical sedimentations and the sensible implications with which it is
filled, must be presented to a perpetual absence.
Thus, our situation is the following: to know that we think, first we
must actually think. And yet, this engagement does not remove all doubt,
my thoughts do not stifle my power of interrogation; a word, an idea,
considered as events in my history, only have a sense for me if I take
up this sense from within. I know that I think through some particular
thoughts that I have, and I know that I have these thoughts because I take
them up, that is, because I know that I think in general. The intending
461
422 part three
of a transcendent term and the view of myself intending it, or the consciousness
of the connected and the consciousness of the connecting,
are in a circular relation. The problem is to understand how I can be the
one constituting my thought in general, without which it would not be
thought by anyone, would pass by unnoticed, and would thus not be a
thought – without ever being the one constituting any particular one of
my thoughts, since I never see them born in plain view, and since I only
know myself through them. We must attempt to understand how subjectivity
can be simultaneously dependent and indeclinable.
[o. Tacit cogito and spoken cogito.]
Let us attempt to gain this understanding through the example of language.
There is a consciousness of myself who makes use of language, and
who is thoroughly buzzing with words. I read the “Second Meditation.”
“Myself” is clearly at issue here, but this is a myself as an idea that is not,
strictly speaking, my own, nor Descartes’s for that matter; it is the myself of
every reflecting man. By following the sense of the words and the thread of
ideas, I arrive at the conclusion that indeed, because I think, I am; but this
is a second-hand Cogito.46 I have only grasped my thought and my existence
through the medium of language, and the true formulation of this Cogito
would be: “One thinks, one is” [On pense, on est]. The wonder of language is
that it makes itself be forgotten: my gaze is drawn along the lines on the
paper, from the moment that I am struck by what they signify, I no longer
see them. The paper, the letters on the paper, my eyes, and my body are only
present as the minimum of production materials necessary for some invisible
operation. The expression fades away in the face of the expressed, and
this is why its role as mediator can pass by unnoticed, and why Descartes
nowhere mentions it. Descartes and, a fortiori, his reader begin meditating
within a universe that is already speaking [parlant]. Language has, in fact,
installed in us this certainty that we have of reaching, beyond its expression,
a truth separable from that expression, and of which this expression
is only the clothing and the contingent manifestation. Language only
appears to be a simple sign when it has taken on a signification, and the
coming to awareness, in order to be complete, must uncover the expressive
unity in which signs and significations first appear.
When a child does not know how to speak, or when he does not yet
know how to speak the adult’s language, the linguistic ceremony that
462
the cogito 423
unfolds around him has no hold on him, he is near to us like a poorly
placed spectator at the theater: he sees clearly that we are laughing and
gesticulating, he hears the nasal melody, but there is nothing at the end of
those gestures or behind those words, nothing happens for him. Language
takes on a sense for the child when it creates a situation for him. In a children’s
book, we are told of the disappointment of a young boy who puts
on his grandmother’s glasses, opens her book, and believes he will be
able to find for himself the stories that she has read to him. The fable ends
with these two lines:
Rats! So where is the story?
I see nothing but black and white.47
For the child, the “story” and the expressed are not “ideas” or “significations,”
nor are speech and reading “intellectual operations.” The story is
a world that he should be able to make appear, as if by magic, by putting
on the spectacles and by leaning over a book. The power language has
of bringing the expressed into existence, and of opening routes, new
dimensions, and new landscapes to thought, is ultimately just as obscure
for the adult as it is for the child. In every successful work, the sense
imported into the reader’s mind exceeds already constituted language
and thought, and magically appears during the linguistic incantation, just
as the story emanates from the grandmother’s book.
If we believe that, through thought, we communicate directly with a
universe of truth and meet up with others in that universe, or if it seems
that Descartes’s text has simply awakened in us some already formed
thoughts and that we never learn anything from the outside, and finally,
if a philosopher – in what is supposed to be a radical meditation – does
not even mention language as a condition of the Cogito as read and does not
more explicitly invite us to pass from the idea to the practice of the Cogito,
this is because, for us, the expressive operation is taken for granted, and
because it counts as one of our acquisitions. The Cogito that we obtain
by reading Descartes (and even the one that Descartes performs with
the intention of expressing it and when, turning toward his own life,
he determines it, objectifies it, and “characterizes” it as indubitable) is
thus a spoken Cogito, put into words and understood through words; it
is a Cogito that, for this very reason, fails to reach its goal, since a part of
our existence – the part that is busy conceptually determining our life
463
424 part three
and conceiving of it as indubitable – escapes this very determination
and conception. Shall we conclude from this that language envelops us
and that we are carried by language in the manner the realist believes we
are determined by the exterior world, or in the manner the theologian
believes we are guided by Providence? This would be to forget half of
the truth. For after all, words (such as the words “Cogito” or “sum”) can
certainly have an empirical and statistical sense, and it is true that they do
not directly intend my experience and that they ground an anonymous
and general thought; but I would not find any sense in them, not even a
derived and inauthentic one, and I could not even read Descartes’s text,
were I not – prior to every speech – in contact with my own life and my
own thought, nor if the spoken Cogito did not encounter a tacit Cogito
within me. In writing his Méditations, Descartes was aiming at this silent
Cogito, which animates and directs all of the expressive operations that,
by definition, fail to reach their goal, since they interpose – between
Descartes’s existence and the knowledge that he gains of this existence –
the entire thickness of cultural acquisitions; but, on the other hand, these
expressive operations would not even be attempted if Descartes had not,
at the outset, had his own existence in sight. Everything hangs on gaining
a clear understanding of the tacit Cogito, on only putting into it what is
really there, and on not turning language into a product of consciousness
on the pretext that consciousness is not a product of language.