Quotes About Subjectivity

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

I rediscover the world - which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations - 'in myself' as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.

To constitute...is nearly the opposite of to institute: the instituted makes sense without me, the constituted makes sense only for me and for the 'me' of this instant...The instituted straddles its future, has its future its temporality, the constituted depends entirely on the 'me' who constitutes (the body, the clock).

I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel's phrase, a 'hole in being,' but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.

To say that I have a visual field means that I have an access and an opening to a system of visible beings through my position, and that they are available to my gaze in virtue of a kind of primordial contact and by a gift of nature, without any effort required on my part. In other words, it means that vision is pre-personal.

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself--or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

We are already in the being thus described, that we are of it, that between it and us there is Einfühlung. That means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world, and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of mutual transgression or of overlapping.

The subject is not so much the intelligent subject as the desiring subject.

The world and others become our flesh.

The body is the seat of a certain praxis, the point from which there is something to do in the world, the register in which we are inscribed and whose inscription we continue.

The...present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it--It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours--a swelling or bulb of time...an institution, a system of equivalences.

Time is never completely constituted.

The Umwelt is less and less oriented toward a goal and more and more toward the interpretation of symbols.

I do not perceive simply "things" but also use-objects: an article of clothing, for example...Nerve functioning distributes not only spatial and chromatic values but also symbolic values.

There are several ways for the body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

Each one can be, according to the moment, I or You or They....Insofar as we live in language, we are not only I; we haunt all grammatical persons, as we are at their intersection, at their crossroads, at their tuft.

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

We perceive others as reflections and at the same time as lacunae in relation to ourselves. In effect, it is like a forbidden zone...With others, it will always be impossible to perceive them in their totalities--that is, to perceive them as they perceive themselves.

The person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

L'Être est ce qui exige de nous création pour que nous en ayons l'expérience.

There is no absolute 'in-itself,' and no absolute 'for us'—for the same reasons, i.e., their reciprocal relativization, their 'mutual coincidence.' -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The (ultimate) formula: 'the absolute is the subject' does not mean that there is only a subject. The 'free' is freedom of the free and the related. The absolute is the 'sameness' of the absolute and the relative. The true subject is the subjectivity of the subject and the object. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel