Cosmological Operations

The complex mosaic of struggles and aspirations of modernity can also be seen as a nonlinear sequence of cosmological operations. The first one dates back to René Descartes’ aborted attempt to construct a Copernican philosophy. In his unpublished treatise on The World, written between 1630 and 1633, Descartes declared: “I include the planets and the comets together with the Earth because they, like it, also resist light and reflect its rays, and so I recognize no difference between them”.