ABSTRACT
The eye opens the subject to the world. If I close my eyes, the world is no longer there and I am no longer in the world. The other's gaze, the flicker in her eye lets me know that I am a presence. That flicker betrays her awareness that I see her; it is the awareness itself. Because seeing and looking are intertwined, everything visual is loaded with affect. The eye is the organ of transcendence, and seeing a transitive occupation. Merely by lifting our eyelids we come onto the threshold of the objective world. And the range of our vision, by defining the visual field, suggests that there is more than meets the eye, that experience is self-transcending. The bounded nature of perception is expressed in the notion of horizon. A subjective byproduct of the objectivity of visual experience, the horizon is not only the condition of possibility of all acts of perception but also a melancholy sign of the viewer's finitude, a marker of his confinement and thus of his exposure. It is Finis Terrae, the end of the world as seen by an embodied subjectivity.
