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Monday, 26 December 2016



If you could explain where you are and how you got here that would be phenomenology, a model of the world according to the subject, and it would serve to confirm that you are such a subject. This kind of phenomenology does not exist except as a sort of impossible ideal, as is shown by the fact that your states cannot be explicated in a transparent way as the outcome of freely determined acts of a transcendent subject - an account modelled on perception or on the acquisition of new meanings in discourse, assuming that these could actually be as simple as they seem to be. States like boredom, insomnia, sexual arousal and strong emotion all prove this, if further proof is needed. Proposed phenomenological accounts of these are closer to poetry than philosophy, illuminating their object only in flashes and allusions. There may still be much to gain from a circular account that assumes what it proves and proves what it has already assumed, but it does not rescue the transcendental from its status as functional (or disfunctional) illusion and impossible ideal - does not realise it as working origin. The attempt to rescue failures of this kind simply opens the door to dei ex machina such as heteronomy, the unconscious, or indeed the existence of the other, and to ethics (as foundational). Instead the failure should open your eyes to the realisation that you are no sort of subject, much less the subject.

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