Boris Groys, In the Flow, 2016

Descartes famously said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ But a critically or theoretically minded spectator would say about Descartes: He thinks because he lives. Here my self-knowledge becomes radically undermined. Maybe I do know what I think. But I do not know how I live — I do not even know I am alive. Because I have never experienced myself as dead, I cannot experience myself as being alive. I have to ask others if and how I live — and that means I must also ask what I actually think, because I now see my thinking as being determined by my life. To live is to be exposed as living (and not as dead) to the gaze of the Others. Then it becomes irrelevant what we think, plan, or hope — what is relevant is how our bodies are moving in space under that gaze. [p. 28]