When outlining self-consciousness, Descartes refashions the mind as the formal “I," the thinking thing, the sole ground for ontologi- cal and epistemological accounts. This recentering of the mind, the interior thing, is accomplished through three moves that perform the displacement of exteriority: (a) the ontological disavowal of the human body in the argument that thinking alone defines the exis- tence and essence of man; (b) the epistemological disqualification of the human body and the things that affect it; and (c) the ontoepis- temological disavowal of the "matter": of knowledge, the extended (exterior or affectable) things, the essence and existence of which is determined by the divinity that, now stripped from supernaturality, becomes form. What these formulations that articulate and disavow exterior things indicate, in a text concerned with the conditions of the possibility of knowing the “truth of things,” is why it was neces- sary to write the failure of exteriority to signify the proper ("true") mode of being of man: the attribution of affectability—man's lack- ing the ability to decide on his essence and existence—that is, outer determination. Put differently, Descartes needs to articulate extend- ed things (the human body and the sensible objects of knowledge) to write their ontoepistemological irrelevance lest man, the subject of knowledge, also become a thing whose existence and essence is determined from without, that is, an affectable thing.