Amo, ergo sum

Jean-Luc Marion challenges the Cartesian cogito by stressing the primacy of the erotic. According to Descartes’s formula ( Ego sum res cogitans ), “it follows by omission that I am no longer supposed to love, nor to hate; or better: I am of such a sort that I have neither to love, nor to hate, at least in the first instance. To love would not belong to the first modes of thought and, therefore, would not determine the more original essence of the ego . Man, as ego cogito , thinks, but he does not love, at least from the outset.” But “the most incontestable evidence” demonstrates the opposite: “we are, insofar as we come to know ourselves, always already caught within the tonality of an erotic disposition – love or hate, unhappiness or happiness, enjoyment or suffering, hope or despair, solitude or communion – and that we can never, without lying to ourselves, claim to arrive at a fundamental erotic neutrality . . . . Man is revealed to himself by the originary and radical modality of the erotic.”