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Tuesday, 13 September 2016
To look with the eyes of desire is not to contemplate, or even to appreciate, it is to look with immediate judgement and so with a keener form of vision, one which structures the gaze with merciless efficiency. It is the perceptual analogue to the conceptual clarification that accompanies anger, and like anger must be felt both fully and freely to produce its effect. It is only the impersonal gaze that is capable of contemplation, of seeing each thing reposing in its own unique beauty - but being able to appreciate too broadly such a gaze lacks discrimination and the beauty it unearths all around is pale and sterile. The beauty that answers to desire is personal and exclusionary, as desire distinguishes what it wants and walls its delight away from rival desires, and as such it is scandalous to contemplation which would shrink back from desire's insistence on its privilege of enjoyment - would shrink back if it only could. Nevertheless the two can be reconciled in the contemplation of the desiring gaze, or more accurately in the impersonal assumption of the intensity of another's desire. This is a typical device of art and if immensely productive is of course in thoroughly bad faith. Who is this desiring other pretending to serve contemplation, who is this contemplator pretending to be at peace with desire?
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