Inside meditation Interiority, Reflexivity and Genre in Descartes' 'Meditations'

We have taken an explicit poietical stance when attempting to make a reading of Descartes' Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Our attempt while making a reading is to offer a depiction of the writing involved in Descartes' magnum opus. As it will turn out, this depiction of writing will only complete itself once we offer a depiction of the reading that the text itself requires. Borrowing from the works of Michel Foucault, we will use the term self-writing to describe the Meditations, only to argue that Cartesian self-writing determines itself as such because it summons a self-reading. The place of such summoning, its essential locus, is the space opened within the first person singular. Our analysis will try to show how the space of the 'I' is essentially constructed in writing with the aim of universalizability, only for it to be actualized by the reader. The constitution of the self in writing or self-writing, therefore, will occur once the reader steps into the place of the authorial 'I', constituting his or her own self in that space by means of the activity of reading or self-reading. If and when this happens, we are in a position to speak of the 'I' as a placeholder in terms of it procuring the space for a conceptual transition between two sets of equivalencies. Such transition would consist in conceptually moving from the set of equivalencies: author = meditator = character, to the set of equivalencies: reader = meditator = character. But this, so we claim, is only possible by operating on the 'I''s interiority. Consequently, we will focus on three avatars of interiority that will help us understand the inner construction of the placeholder's space: the confessional, the literary and the metaphysical. Each inner space will be characterized by the operations performed on the avatar it determines, allowing us to plot -as it were- certain inner coordinates.