Im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung „Ideengeschichtliche Pfade“ hält Prof. Dr. Cecilia Sjöholm von der Södertörn University Stockholm am 26. Mai 2025, 18.15 Uhr, einen Vortrag zum Thema „Descartes, images and drives“.

In René Descartes philosophy, images are central. He used engravings in his natural philosophy, in order to explore aspects of nature that are not visible to the eye – including the inside of the human body. At the same time, his theory of mind relies on ideas of inner images, memories and fantasies. He describes states between sleep and wakefulness, where our perception is more conditioned by physical states and neurological traces than things in the outer world.  The same goes for visual impressions in states of dream: dreams “are like paintings”, in which one can only trust the realness of colors. In my talk I will be discussing the status of inner images in Descartes, relating his ideas to psychoanalytical theories of the gaze as a concept of drive. Inscribed in the Cartesian explorations of light and vision we find a scopic drive –figured through dissections of organs: the origin of the gaze, the origin of thought, the origin of memories and so on. Descartes images line the limits of what we cannot see: rather than merely completing a theory of perception, they also figure a vanishing point, what Jacques Lacan has called anamorphosis.

Cecilia Sjöholm is professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University. Her published research is particularly focused on the relation between art and politics in contemporary culture. Her recent publications include Aisthesis II, ed with Sven-Olov Wallenstein, 2023), Doing Aesthetics with Arendt; How to See Things (Columbia UP 2015). Her latest book Through the Eyes of Descartes; Seeing, Thinking, Writing (with Marcia Cavalcante Schuback, Indiana UP, 2024), examines Descartes as a thinker of a baroque aesthetics, and brings forth a pre-conceptual subject of the senses, and of desires and drives.