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Sunday, 4 June 2017



Is there any wholly private and solipsistic experience at all? Some internal states are moments in a soliloquy or internal dialogue and the case here requires no argument, the drive towards recognition is clear. But what about the recognition itself, does it need a further recognition, do we need it to be recognised that we now feel recognised? Apparently so, since simple recognition assuages only for a moment and the hunger resumes after our discovery that lack persists in the heart of fulfillment. To wish for recognition is a step on the path to becoming God; the result is necessary but not sufficient for this impossible project. (The only worthwhile projects are impossible.) But what about states of feeling or sensation, purely private moods or pleasures, satisfactions of appetite? Moods are augmented and stabilised by object relations, which means by a system of projections and introjections which is deeply social or pro-social, so that the virtual ego which is the subject of these states is one which depends on a boundary to the social other, posited at the same level of virtuality; the dynamics at the boundary determine the experiential content even when this understands itself as existing far inland. As for matters of taste imagine wanting a coffee and some cake, so you enter a café and look at the display. What will answer to your desire? The girl behind the counter has a cake face so you ask for a recommendation and she points to one, telling you it's her favourite. Welcomed, you sit and eat; and indeed it tastes wonderful. Later, when you leave you thank her for passing on her choice, and she smiles and says 'I hoped you'd like it.' What is explicit here is implicit in every judgment of sensation, and some inversion of this scenario subsists even with pain.

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