ABSTRACT
To repeat, it is clear that no causal relation can be conceived between the subject and his body, his world, or his society. Calling into question what my presence to myself teaches me would result in the loss of the foundations of all of my certainties. Now, at the very moment that I turn toward myself to describe myself, I catch sight of an anonymous flow,1 an overall project in which “states of consciousness” do not yet exist, nor, a fortiori, do characteristics of any kind. I am for myself neither “jealous,” nor “curious,” nor “hunchbacked,” nor “a civil servant.” We are often amazed that the disabled person or the person suffering from a disease can bear their situation. But in their own eyes they are not disabled or dying. Until the moment he slips into a coma, the dying person is inhabited by a consciousness; he is everything that he sees, he has this means of escape. Consciousness can never objectify itself as sick-consciousness or as disabled-consciousness; and, even if the elderly man complains of his old age or the disabled person of his disability, they can only do so when they compare themselves to others or when they see themselves through the eyes of others, that is, when they adopt a statistical or an objective view of themselves; and these complaints are never wholly made in good faith: in returning to the core of his consciousness, everyone feels him 459self to be beyond his particular characteristics and so resigns himself to them. They are the price we pay, without even thinking about it, for being in the world, a formality we take for granted. And this is how we can criticize our own face and yet not wish to exchange it for another.
