Quotes About Consciousness

The invisible is there without being an object, it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the 'visibles' themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence.

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.

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.

Inasmuch as there is figure, there is also inarticulate background, inasmuch as we have being (figure), we don't have it, and inasmuch as we don't have it (background), inasmuch as we let it be without thinking about it, that's when we have it.

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.

My body, which is one of the visibles, sees itself also and thereby makes itself the natural light opening its own interior to the visible, in order for the visible there to become my own landscape, realizing (as it is said) the miraculous promotion of Being to "consciousness," or (as we prefer to say) the segregation of the "within" and the "without

The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul – the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.

Traumatic experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a 'dated' moment; it is of its essence to survive only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality.

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.

In the last analysis each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

For the psychoanalyst, what is original is the structure of the body as an emblem of life.

With psychoanalysis mind passes into body, as inversely, body passes into mind.

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 body schema is a power to vary a certain principle without explicit knowledge of this principle...This playing with a principle that's not possessed is consciousness itself. Consciousness is, if you like, synonymous with imperception. Consciousness of a figure is consciousness without knowledge of a background.

The The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled by meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge upon one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary.

Originary perception is a non-thetic, pre-objective, and preconscious experience.

The 'unconscious'...is simply the pre-objective, oneiric background of all perception.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

The possession of a representation or the exercise of a judgment is not coextensive with the life of consciousness. Rather, consciousness is a network of signification intentions which are sometimes clear to themselves and sometimes, on the contrary, lived rather than known.

The 'associations' of psychoanalysis are in reality 'rays' of time and of the world.

Every sensation is already pregnant with a sense.

The unconscious is a perceiving consciousness... it operates as such through a logic of implication or promiscuity,