This book re-examines the philosophical and personal writings of Descartes from a modernist standpoint, combining philosophical, literary, and historical styles of analysis. It is original, especially in the way it reveals the rhetorical and literary artifices used to express philosophical arguments.
Professor Dalia Judovitz begins by considering the status of ‘the subject’ in Descartes’s writing, along with the representational procedures employed in his elaboration of a theory of subjectivity. The simplicity and seriousness of these questions are kept in sight throughout the complex analyses that follow.
The author shows how subjectivity and representation, which have been essential to both the definition and the critiques of modernism, were originally articulated in the work of Descartes, and through it affected both the philosophical and literary traditions.