While much of experience can go on without what we think of as consciousness, there are certain instances, not themselves self-conscious, which seem only to be possible because of it - in particular intense pleasures (jouissance?) and intense pains. These are not merely treatable as qualia but as something like a qualia overload. These break the witnessing function, analogous to the way that feedback breaks the functioning of an audio system, momentarily forcing a different kind of awareness. But sometimes everything becomes a teasing metaphor for consciousness.