Does matter have eyes?
Is there a vision of matter, that belongs to matter its self?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his late MS., *The Visible and the Invisible*, recognizes that all matter, organic and inorganic, sees, and that the "subject" so-called is located in relation to this inordinate, ongoing gazing.
The subject is only a subject as it gazes and is gazed at, and partakes of a common gaze that is the gaze of the created, Univocal or 'General Being'.
This mutual gaze of 'General Being', the gaze of all emergence, is neutral, true in and of itself, a universal form of power or power dispersed (& Foucault may recognize such an ideal economy of power in Benthem's project for a Panopticon)
What I am concerned with after Merleau-Ponty is a radical mutuality of the gaze extended to the sensorium in its relation to nervous system / mind, a mutality called 'General Being' and recognized in 'chiasmic' relation. Interpenetrating, intussuceptive -- however both terms seem inadequate, not radical enough. The best image of chiasmus may not be an image at all; but pre-cognized (ek-cognized?) by the one who, touching their self, loses the self at an edge where the self as thing and as reflective consciousness blend indefinitely. The result is a blindness. The blank of simulatenously cognizing the sensible and insensible in one other.
In this mutuality all beings emerge and exist, being for and in themselves. "Subject" / "Object" radicalized beyond cognition. Can we imagine this mutuality comprising a film; a total film, a view of all views, that can never be seen except in some never realized eternity? Which are yet, practically, for the purposes of memory and action, always present... Virtually present?
*composed September '05
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