ABSTRACT
An absence of ontology1 “[P]rimus enim sum”2 (for I am the first) declares Descartes about himself in 1647. Under the circumstances, it is a question here of the primacy that he asserts for having determined the cogitatio (thought) as the principal attribute of incorporeal substance. For us, however, this primacy essentially brings to light a more radical innovation and one, curiously, less emphasized by critics [critiques] of Descartes. Primus sum (I am the first): the verb to be occurs first. First must here be understood in two senses: it occurs first, as it were immediately, almost at the beginning. And especially, it occurs as the first person singular, sum; Descartes conducts his philosophy in this, then, that for him to be, esse (even therefore ) is said first under the figure of sum; it is declined firstly under the first thinkable inclination, the inclination of and toward the ego. Aristotle defines (being, which is-which [is] the substance) as that which, originally (and thus, equally now as for the following), proposes itself as to be sought and slips away each time as inaccessible.3 Descartes responds to this injunction, in a sense that we shall have to consider carefully, and he himself eludes this same sense, for “enim” (for) for him (and fairly we cannot introduce this “point of view: for him” except as precisely for him, that is for the first ego or sooner the first, first ego), for him then, primordially, esse is said as sum. The question (or: how is it with being qua being?), is no longer oriented upon the path of (substance), and this at the inevitable risk of an errancy measured on the infinity of diverse beings. The question ceases, completed, from the moment of its first enunciation: primus enim sum; as soon as the ego intervenes the cause of esse is found to be understood: viz. esse amounts to sum. It is incumbent upon him who says sum, to claim of esse its modern sense or, rather, to declare it in its modern sense. Sum pronounces the understood cause of esse, “primus enim sum”: thereafter, everything shall be only in as much as it comes out of sum. A short-circuit: parting from esse, the question no longer runs its course freely, far off; its course cuts shortest, and is stopped at the first to come: “primus enim sum”. Short-circuit, in the way we speak of “short-circuits”, for indeed it is as much the cause of the ens (being) —and still more the cause of the (being) which remains obstinately and obscurely attached to it-this cause will no longer be understood except in finding itself cut short. Eventually therefore, in finding itself precisely not understood as such. For if primus sum can, to a prepossessed ear, respond to the question ? (what is being?), if indeed it must in all rigour maintain the rapprochement which makes the one text speak in the other of the two texts [of Aristotle and Descartes], then immediately the sum is shown to be invested with a redoubtable dignity, for itself that is. Sum responds not only, nor even first, to the question: “Am I, I who think?” It responds to that which Aristotle is unable to consider and confront except in saying
, that is to say [in asking] the question ? But what of the ens in quantum ens (being qua being)? Descartes responds “primus enim sum”. The first manner through which esse is said has a name-sum. “[P]rimus enim sum” does not so much indicate a primacy of existence-i.e. the first being for him who philosophizes in the order, “ordine philosophanti”4as it does a primacy of essence. Or rather, as it is not yet a question here of the distinction between existentia/essentia, this concerns a response to the interrogation , viz. how is it with the essencing of the being [l’estance de l’étant]?
