ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes employed his Meditations on First Philosophy to free language and ideas from the shackles of matter and embodiment. This separation fostered not only bifurcations of mind and body, logic and emotion, or information and meaning. Architecturally, it formed the wedge between space and place and asserted the primacy of the former's non-materiality. On the side of use and embodied engagement, the Marquis de Sade wrote the equal and opposite response. His The 120 Days of Sodom is exemplary in this regard, providing a catalogue of perversions from which Cartesians, and in fact most of culture since, have fled into the purities of mind, logic and information. These two writers opened a gulf where a continuum once stood. Descartes conceived body and mind and, as extrapolated by others, spatial extension and thought, as dualistic co-identities connected in problematic ways, but wholly distinct in character, order, and appropriate methods of measurement.
