ABSTRACT
The imagination, as we have seen, is one way-and often a pathological one-of bringing the contingency of the world under control. This contingency is encountered as absurd; we are, in the language of the essay on intentionality quoted above, ‘rejected, abandoned by our very nature in an indifferent, hostile and intractable world’ (S I:31). But it is not yet clear who we are, who it is that exercises the power of nihilation of which consciousness disposes, one of whose manifestations is the image of the absent object, posited as a negation of that absence. Whose consciousness, in fact, is it? In the first instance surely mine: these words are my words, these images my images. But ‘there is nothing under the words, behind the images’ (IN 125)—nothing interior, ‘for finally everything is outside, everything, even including ourselves’ (S I:32). The ‘me’, therefore, cannot be a concrete, substantial subject, occupying a place in the world over against the concrete, substantial objects that it encounters in perception or posits in imagination. Subjectivity, whatever it may turn out to involve, cannot mean the living of a private life; whatever may be true of me cannot be secretly true, nor can I know it as it were from the inside.
