ABSTRACT
The Crossing of the Gazes The unconsciousness that we are seeking can therefore be reached. It is not a matter of an unconsciousness wherein the process of a likely love is clouded over with illusory ambiguities; nor is it a matter of simple inversion of the axis of the gaze, where the function of the I simply displaces itself from one to the other of the terms at play, thereby reinforcing all the more its validity. Instead, it is a matter of a consciousness that exerts itself on my consciousness, without following it into polarization in terms of the I-a consciousness against the grain of the I. The moral injunction (Gewissen) brings to bear the consciousness of an obligation that imposes itself on the I and thus destroys it as originary pole. Still consciousness is not closed up (Bewusstsein) in the indistinctness of the id. The I reduced to the me retains consciousness, precisely so as to see that it no longer becomes conscious of itself, but of an obligation that links it, despite itself, to the anterior other. The moral consciousness forbids the transcendental consciousness to fold itself back over and into an I and enjoins it to see itself as consciousness, in itself, of the other than self. The moral consciousness contradicts self-consciousness by counterbalancing the intentionality exerted by the I, thanks to the injunction summoning me. The injunction constrains and contains intentionality; intentionality objectifies the other on the basis of the I, but all the same, the injunction summons me on the basis and in the name of the invisible other. The invisibility passes from one extreme to the other, the means alone remaining visible to the corresponding aim. Whence comes what we will from now on consider the phenomenological determination of love: two definitively invisible gazes (intentionality and the injunction) cross one another, and thus together trace a cross that is invisible to every gaze other than theirs alone. Each of the two gazes renounces seeing visibly the other gaze-the object alone can be seen, the eye’s corpse-in order to expose its own invisible intention to the invisible impact of the other intention. Two gazes, definitively invisible, cross and, in this crossing, renounce their invisibility. They consent to let themselves be seen without seeing and invert the original disposition of every (de)nominative gaze-to see without being seen. To love would thus be defined as seeing the definitively invisible aim of my gaze nonetheless exposed by the aim of
* This excerpt is taken from Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002) 86-101. Reproduced with kind permission.
