Quotes About Subjectivity

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.

We experience a perception and its horizon "in action" rather than by "posing" them or explicitly "knowing" them.

Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it...If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity.

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

There is a ti,e inherent to Nature. This time, in Whitehead, is inherent to the things, it embaces us, to the extent that we participate in the things, or that we take part in the process of Nature. It is essential for us, but insofar as we are Nature. Subjectivity is caught up in the system of a cosmic time, in a subjectivity of Nature.

Empathy makes it that there is "the one" and not "the same.

It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.

In between the microscopic facts, global reality is delineated like a watermark, never graspable for objectivizing-particularizing thinking, never eliminate from or reducible to the microscopic: we had only a bit of protoplasmic jelly, and we then have an embryo, by a transformation which, always too early or too late, we were never witness to in our investment in a biological field.

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder.

What resists phenomenology within us -- natural being, the 'barbarous' source that Schelling spoke of -- cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it.

I can never say 'I' absolutely.

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory

Self and other are not two distinct substances...We are both, other and self, two variables of the same system.

What makes the weight, the density, the flesh of each color, each sound, each tactile texture, of the present and the world is that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them, that he is the sensible coming to itself and that in return the sensible is to his eyes lime the double or an expression of his flesh.

Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.

Our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it that we had or that we could have.

We shall render explicit the cohesion of the obverse and the reverse of my body which is responsible for the fact that my body—which is visible, tangible like a thing—acquires this view upon itself, this contact with itself, where it doubles itself up, unifies itself, in such a way that the objective body and the phenomenal body turn about one another or encroach upon one another.

Through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible.

Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

If it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of of the world.

The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience.

The perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis. Subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing other than temporality...In every moment of focusing, my body ties a present, a past, and a future together. It secretes time, or rather it becomes that place in nature where for the first time events, rather than pushing each other into being, project a double horizon of the past and future around the present and acquire a historical orientation.