Ego sum, ego existo. Per una rilettura della res cogitans

Abstract

The notion of res cogitans has constituted a privileged critical objective of readings of modern subjectivity in a deconstructionist key, coming to act as a term in which there seem to merge, in a sort of fatal alliance, hyperconscientialism, reification, solipsism and everything the contemporary culture attributes to bad metaphysics, or even to metaphysics tout court. However, also and above all when it is understood within the ontologically strong meaning of substantia, the Cartesian reference to res cogitans does not necessarily denote the simple outcome of the I folding back into alleged and undisturbed autonomy. It also proves to be the locus in which what is challenged is precisely the idea that the I-subject, in the sense of that evidence that holds together the cogito and the sum, concerns a self-concussed form of self-founded knowledge.