Through the Eyes of Descartes: Seeing, Thinking, Writing

＂I shall here present my life,＂ writes Descartes in Discourse on Method, ＂as in a painting＂ and my method ＂as a fable.＂ Through the Eyes of Descartes demonstrates how a Cartesian aesthetics is interwoven in his thought. It brings together a variety of materials: his metaphysical writings and essays in natural philosophy, through to his letters, drawings, and printed images.

Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback seek to bring Descartes into dialogue with contemporary phenomenology as well as contemporary psychoanalytic thought. They focus on how perception interacts with emotions and thought, and the way in which our gaze is directed toward limit-phenomena of beauty and fascination.

In Through the Eyes of Descartes, Cecilia Sjöholm and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback counter the traditional picture of Descartes by presenting his work in an entirely different light: a Descartes of the arts, of sensibility, of inner images, and of imagination.

Cecilia Sjöholm is Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University. Her books include Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things, Kristeva and the Political, and The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University. Her books include Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot and Clarice Lispector, The End of the World and Dis-orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity.