The volume advances a precise wager: that the most stringent account of the unconscious in the wake of Freud emerges when the Cartesian cogito is treated neither as a worn emblem of transparent self-presence nor as a quaint philosophical fossil, but as a shibboleth that divides conceptual labor and tests the rigor of method. Its distinctive contribution lies in formalizing this test across three articulated terrains—the logical articulation of subjectivity as subject of the unconscious, the refractory status of the body as the site where thinking is exposed to drive and enjoyment, and the ideological relay where the empty place of the subject becomes operational in institutions and knowledge—so that each terrain both secures and displaces the others. The book thus offers a program: read the unconscious as the structural remainder of the very operation that says “I think.”
The editorial frame is deliberately austere, almost geometric. An introductory orientation isolates the problem of the cogito—not as a doctrine to be affirmed or denied, but as an operator whose use stratifies philosophical practice. The collection then proceeds through three sequences. The first sequence demonstrates why the Freudo-Lacanian subject must be written on the line opened by the bare act I think, stripped of descriptive psychology and personological content. The second sequence compels the system to pass through the intransigent opacity of the body: the cogito meets the drive, and the scene of thinking receives its obscure material support in figures of monstrosity, touch, voice, and a strangely dislocated vision. The third sequence registers the consequences of this passage at the level of critique: expenditure and sovereignty, interpellation and ideological scene-setting, the very staging of a “theater” of mind in cognitive science. The composition harbors its own dialectic: what begins as an argument about a proposition (cogito) gradually transposes into a demonstration about a topology (subject–Other–drive–body–ideology), and finally into a critique of methods that refuse this topology while presuming its effects. The outer framing—an introduction that names the cogito as a test and a closing return to the problem under contemporary conditions—gives the book the form of a single, continuous experiment that changes the variables as it proceeds.
The opening claim insists on a distinction between a classical picture of the cogito as epistemic foundation and the operative minimalism that matters for psychoanalysis. The cogito is read as a pure performative cut, I think, the I emptied of predicates at the very moment of asserting itself. This voiding is not a poetic flourish. It licenses the structural thesis that the psychoanalytic subject is beyond the ego and its properties and within the signifying operation that splits any enunciation from the enunciating instance. The book’s first achievement is to stage the convergent evidence for this thesis from within the analytic field: slips, dreams, formations of the unconscious are treated as events of enunciation in which the subject is present as absence, indexable only by the discontinuities they introduce. The logic is exact: the I that says I think can be identified only by its subtractive difference from what it says; that difference is what analytic practice calls the unconscious. The argument’s force depends on refusing to treat the unconscious as a reservoir of contents and insisting on its structural status as the effect of speech and the signifier.
Against the temptation to psychologize the cogito, the volume mobilizes a canon internal to the analytic orientation. One axis revolves around the formalization of the subject: the thesis that the subject of the unconscious coincides with the Cartesian subject rests on the recognition that both are defined by an irreparable split. In Lacan’s algebra, the subject is marked as barred (S̷): a name for the subtraction that the cogito enacts, not a metaphysical substance. Another axis binds this formalization to praxis. The clinical stake lies in recognizing how the analytic situation produces the subject as this gap—as the enunciating instance that appears only in the crack of the enunciation and that is indexed by the signifier of lack. The evidence deployed is resolutely technical: the insistence of a signifier beyond meaning, the point de capiton where meaning is pinned and simultaneously held open, the drive’s circuit as a formally closed, topologically paradoxical path around a void.
The collection’s method is cumulative. It proposes that a minimal logical thesis—the “I think” extracts an empty subject-position—must be re-substantiated in material, ethical, and political registers. The material register arrives with the body. The essays do not aestheticize embodiment; they treat the body as the insistence of a non-intentional support that thinking cannot domesticate. The reference points are chosen for their exemplary power: classical metaphysical attempts to hold thought and extension together, theological and occasionalist proposals where a mediating God sutures the gap, clinical scenes where the voice or gaze functions as an object irreducible to knowledge. The body becomes the name for a structural scandal: the cogito cannot ground it, yet the cogito’s very act generates the remainder that the drive will then circulate around. What the book calls monstrosity, obscene protuberance, or sirenic voice are not decorative metaphors; they are exact designations for objects that function at the edges of the subject’s field, the objet a that both animates and derails desire.
The argumentative economy here is careful. If the cogito isolates a point without qualities, the body introduces qualities without a point. The essays refuse to resolve this mismatch into a synthesis. They trace instead a relay where the subtraction that defines the subject calls forth a compensatory production of surplus—of excitation, image, and voice—whose law is not representation but jouissance. In this sense the body does not answer the cogito; it insists as its consequence. Clinical fragments on the voice as lethal call, on a gaze that does not belong to a subject but appears to emanate from the scene itself, on the pleasure–pain economy of the drive that circles its target without ever attaining it, furnish the evidence that the body’s opacity is structural. The analytic lexicon here remains economical. Drive is treated as a partial, repetitive circuit oriented to a hole generated by the signifier; enjoyment (jouissance) names the stubborn, non-homeostatic satisfaction that clings to this circuit; the objet a is the formal index of the remainder that the signifying operation elicits and that the drive pursues.
Having established the passage through the body’s insistence, the collection extends its wager into an ethical register, using Kantian rigor as a foil and ally. The problem is not whether the cogito can ground morality, but how the formal emptiness of the subject interacts with the rigor of law and duty. The reading secures a double instruction. First, the impersonal character of ethical obligation aligns with the subtraction enacted by I think: duty attaches to a subject precisely insofar as no personal predicate secures exemption. Second, the moral law induces a paradoxical surplus of enjoyment at the very point of renunciation. The essays isolate this paradox as structurally necessary, neither a pathology introduced from the outside nor a failure of rational design. A cool demonstration unfolds: the categorical form of obligation produces an excess beyond measure; when the subject obeys the law, a remainder of enjoyment is generated that cannot be deduced from prudential reason. This articulation matters because it shows why psychoanalysis can speak of ethics without psychologizing it and of enjoyment without moralizing it. The cogito is thereby shown to be both a zero-point of authority and a generator of excess, which the drive will seize upon and circulate.
In parallel, the volume undertakes a passage through sovereignty and expenditure to examine how the cogito fares when it meets the political. The conceptual connection is exact: if the cogito isolates a pure place of decision, sovereignty names an attempt to incarnate that place in ritual, ritualized violence, or legal form. The reading of expenditure—the deliberate burning of resources beyond economic utility—does not merely cite anthropological anecdotes; it identifies in sovereignty a structural investment in the loss that guarantees its dignity. This turns the cogito’s emptiness into a political operator: the void place of agency, when incarnated, demands sacrifices that verify it. The evidence accumulates across disparate materials, yet the analytic of form holds them together: sovereignty performs the zero-point by staging waste, by elevating useless excess into a guarantee of order. The result is a sober diagnosis: the cogito is not politically innocent once its place is occupied; its emptiness solicits practices that invest the void with obscene supplements. The analytic motif of obscene underside—the hidden law that stabilizes public Law—is given sharp definition in this relay.
The book’s center of gravity remains theoretical. It isolates four elementary modes of modern subjectivity, not as historical epochs but as structural positions that can be indexed by their relation to knowledge, enjoyment, and authority. The proposal is schematic without being reductive: one mode privileges a sovereign self-mastery that denies the unconscious; a second doubles the subject in obsessive vigilance, maintaining thinking as a talisman against annihilation; a third seeks dissolution in ecstatic or transgressive excess; a fourth installs a cynical, instrumental relation to images and signs. The collection’s claim is that these modes are sexualized in their very grammar. The sexualization at stake has nothing to do with content; it concerns the way desire is organized around lack and surplus, the way enjoyment is apportioned, and the way prohibitions and permissions structure the subject’s address to the Other. The essays draw on cultural scenes—cinema, popular fiction, the fragmentary theater of modern media—to display these modes in motion, not as illustrations but as proofs that the formal grammar of subjectivity becomes legible where fantasies manage the gap between the enunciated and the enunciating instance.
The second sequence’s most striking ingenuity is to read the body’s scandal through seventeenth-century metaphysics and its theological afterimages. Occasionalism serves here as a lens: instead of a continuous bridge between res cogitans and res extensa, there is a series of divinely guaranteed alignments that never quite cease to be miraculous. The analytic lesson is not historical piety but a recognition that thought’s relation to its bodily support is always arranged, never internal. The essays render this arrangement in images that border on the grotesque: a monstrosity with a phallic protuberance in place of an eye makes literal the impossible meeting of vision and organ, idea and object; the voice that commands, seduces, or kills appears as a detached, radiant instrument, at once material and without a locus in the thinking subject. In each case, the figure is a rigorous construction of the objet a—the errant object that marks the subject’s division and that no synthesis can absorb. The cogito thereby acquires a body only insofar as it is haunted by these orphaned objects, partial by definition and constitutively misaligned with representation.
The sequence on voice and sirenry conducts this argument with clinical precision. The voice is framed as an object that precedes meaning and outlasts it, an acoustic strip that takes hold of the subject before the subject can take hold of it. The fable of the sirens is read as a laboratory scene for binding lethal enjoyment: Odysseus hears without obeying only by staging a constraint that partitions the field of action; enjoyment is localized in the ear while agency is deported to the bound body. The analytic maxim follows: enjoyment must be localized to be tolerated; the subject’s survival is purchased by the constitution of zones where the excess can circulate without destroying the agent. This is neither a moral allegory nor a mythographic indulgence; it is a crisp formulation of how analysis handles the voice in transference and interpretation, where the analyst’s silence, timing, and minimal interventions form a rig that lets the patient hear without being consumed by the hearing.
If the first two sequences establish the logical and material conditions for a psychoanalytic reading of the cogito, the final sequence sharpens the polemic where contemporary discourses would dissolve or bypass the problem. Three targets are considered exemplary. First, theories of expenditure and sovereignty that would refute rational economy in the name of a sacred excess are subjected to a higher-order economy: the excess is shown to be generated by the very subtraction that defines the subject; it is not primordial plenitude but a derivative supplement. Second, theories of interpellation that dissolve the subject into ideological apparatuses are corrected by inserting the empty place back into the scene: the subject is indeed “made,” but made as a gap that no apparatus can saturate. The evidence here is textual and structural: the very call that hails presupposes a listening instance that cannot be reduced to any position of knowledge or power; identification proceeds by misrecognition because an inassimilable remainder insists. Third, cognitive-scientific polemics against the “Cartesian theater” are criticized for attacking a picture that psychoanalysis neither endorses nor needs. The theater that matters is the minimal stage where enunciation and enunciated exchange places; the “homunculus” is disarmed not by locating a supervising executive but by formalizing the split that renders any such executive structurally blind to itself. The critique is restrained yet firm: when models of mind disavow the empty operator I think in the name of distributed processing, they often reintroduce a surrogate supervisor elsewhere, whereas the analytic reading dissolves the very need for such a figure by situating agency in the cut itself.
The cumulative effect is of a single argument that changes medium while preserving form. It begins as a logic of subjectivity, where the cogito is a performative subtraction that indexes the subject of the unconscious. It continues as a material analysis, where the body, voice, gaze, and drive are registered as the residual economy that the subtraction engenders. It culminates in a critique of contemporary pictures—sacred excess, ideological fabrication, cognitive theater—that maintain a phantom of plenitude, whether sacred, social, or computational, in the place that the analytic reading reserves for an operation without content. Across this itinerary, the essays maintain a strict economy of quotation and example: they privilege structural demonstration over anecdote, clinical articulation over biography, and conceptual explicitness over descriptive sympathy. The tone is consistently objective, yet it does not concede any part of the analytic specificity to generic philosophical rationality; it shows rather that psychoanalysis becomes fully legible only when it accepts the discipline of a philosophical operator and pushes it past its comfort.
The book’s inner composition amplifies this discipline by organizing a series of controlled crossings between canonically separated fields. A reading of Kant cannot remain a moral exegesis; it must specify how the rigor of law generates the surplus that the drive exploits. A reading of occasionalism cannot remain a theological curiosity; it must make visible how the dislocation between thinking and body produces the obscene object that analytic technique must learn to handle. A reading of ideology cannot remain a sociology of power; it must restore the structural gap that no ritual of hailing can close. And a reading of cognitive science cannot remain a taxonomy of models; it must confront the question of the place from which any model is enunciated. The argument’s credibility rests on these crossings, because the crossings exhibit invariants: the void place of the subject, the circulation of a partial object, the production of surplus enjoyment at the point of law, and the necessity of an Other as a structural position that guarantees neither meaning nor salvation.
One of the volume’s quiet strengths is its refusal of nostalgia. The cogito is not recruited to rescue modernity from its critics. The wager is stricter: the analytic field requires an operator of subtraction in order to maintain its difference from psychology and ideology; the cogito—in its minimal, purified version—is the operator we possess. The essays do not court reconciliation. They demonstrate that once one allows the operator to function, the expected reconciliations no longer appear as necessary; the subject remains barred, the body remains excessive, and the social field remains staged on a gap. The gain is clarity of method. In clinical practice, this clarity means that interpretation must aim at the enunciation, not at the person; that silence and timing are forms of knowledge, not signs of ignorance; that enjoyment must be localized, not expelled; and that the subject’s freedom is compatible with structural determination because freedom names the insistence of the cut, not the fullness of a will.
The relation to Descartes is thereby clarified. The cogito is retrieved neither as foundation nor as an ancestor to be superseded but as a formal operator whose effect—subject as lack—psychoanalysis radicalizes. The scholastic opposition between substantial thinking thing and extended thing is displaced by a topology: a subject that appears only where a signifier fails to say what it says; a body that insists where meaning frays; an Other that guarantees nothing beyond the scene of address; and objects that migrate through this field as indices of a loss that commands attachment. When the collection ventures into cultural analysis, it does so to test the invariants on moving ground: the cinema frame that looks back at the spectator as if endowed with a gaze; the narrative of sovereign decision that requires a secret obscene supplement to stabilize the public law; the romance of instrumental reason that attempts to cleanse enjoyment only to reinstall it in displaced form as fascination with images and voices.
This synthesis entails a definite view of method. The book’s method is constructive negativity: it constructs the conditions under which negation operates, so that the negative becomes a generator of form. The I think is such a construction. It is minimal and austere, yet it produces the very conditions of the phenomena that will then seem to contradict it: the opacity of the body, the insistence of drive, the turbulence of ideology. By writing the negative at the origin, the collection secures a disciplinarity for psychoanalysis that neither dissolves into cultural studies nor hardens into metaphysical doctrine. The proof is in the relay from one sequence to another. Each section inherits a problem from the previous one and transforms it. The first establishes the subject as subtraction; the second inherits the subtraction as a wound and maps the circuits that form around it; the third inherits the circuits and identifies the institutional and discursive apparatuses that stabilize them. At each step, the cogito changes its sense without losing its function. It begins as an act, becomes a site, and ends as a criterion by which to adjudicate competing pictures of mind and society.
The closing clarifications return to the question that opened the project: what is the scholarly stake of insisting that the subject of the unconscious is the Cartesian cogito? The stake is threefold. First, it secures a concept of the subject adequate to analytic experience, one that avoids psychologism and moralization by refusing every predicate at the point where the subject appears. Second, it furnishes a rigorous account of the body’s scandal without resorting to dualistic lament: the body is the residual economy the signifier engenders, and the drive maps its circuits; the partial objects that populate this economy are therefore conceptual necessities, not mythic adornments. Third, it provides a criterion for critique: ideologies, theories of sovereignty, and cognitive models can be measured against the minimal operator; where they disavow the operator, they invent surrogates that smuggle it back in other guises. The book’s distinctive contribution is to demonstrate this criterion in operation across disparate materials while maintaining the sobriety of an exact vocabulary. Its argument holds together because it treats the cogito as a use, not a relic; a use that leaves a remainder whose name, since Freud, is the unconscious.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment