ABSTRACT
In this opposition, Descartes’ Paris is a world full of dependent relations, leaving no place for the vacuum, a world where clarity and understanding impose on things their notion of what is evident – one only sees what one understands – and Newton’s London is a world with a spirit emptied of dependent relations, determined to see, even if it costs the extinction of its lanterns, confronting what seems uncertain, doubtful or strange. For psychoanalysts, the contradiction between the worlds of Paris and London forms the limits of one and the same path – namely, the limits of the functioning of our thought. Thinking, it could be said, is an incessant journey back and forth between Paris and London.
