Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

22 looking away
phenemenophilic, I would mean that he is attracted to the way things appear
to him, to his own awareness that they appear to him, and to the
power of looking away to treat Erscheinung as Schein.
Complementarily, when Erscheinung is not experienced as though it
were Schein, or when Schein is perceived as though it were normal appearance,
one is back in the realm of fact perception: the effect of freedom
from the imperative to accept the given is unavailable. So, Kaja
Silverman configures phenomenality and dissatisfaction quite differently
when she (properly) emphasizes the identity between appearance and the
given world. Silverman takes the part of the “world spectators” who, as
she retells the story, decline ideality and remain in Plato’s cave out of
commitment to the given world and the appearances that compose it. 29
For her, the world spectator is a “desiring subject” who “derives pleasure
from his own nonsatisfaction” (World Spectators, 11). Since she construes
appearance as Erscheinung, it makes sense for Silverman to claim
that seeing fundamentally “says ‘yes’ to the world” (20). By the same
logic, though, if you do not want to say “yes” to the world, after Kant
you need an alternative to appearance as Erscheinung. Silverman’s world
spectator also belongs to a community of world spectators for whom one
of the main purposes of language is to enable the comparison of perceptions.
So, Silverman’s narrative moves from perception to language.
Again, using the very same logic, the phenomenophile recedes
from language to mere phenomenality: because no one can share (or appropriate)
one’s merely suspensive, illusory or ephemeral perception,
phenomenophilia becomes a way to get away, or imagine getting away,
from other people.
Defenders of the given tend to be impatient with less than explicit affirmation.
Jean-Luc Marion, for example, objects to Pollock’s and Monet’s
concentration on the “intentional” half of the phenomenological subject/
object dyad because to do so is to create a world “to itself,” “only that,”
where intention dies on the surface of the painting. “Without the work of
the invisible [that is, transcendental laws],” he writes, “what we perceive
as visible actually would offer only a rhapsodic spectacle and confusion
29. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).