Moments of Disruption by Sealey Kris

Author:Sealey, Kris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Situating Shame Beyond Reflective and Prereflective Experience

As a movement of intentionality, consciousness simply is its experience; its being resides completely in the objects of experience. Except when under the gaze of the Other, every experience is coupled with this type of self-awareness. As I have shown, there is consciousness of “self” prereflectively, which means that consciousness is aware of itself not as an explicit object, but rather in its awareness of the objects of (its) experience. Self-awareness can also move to the reflective level, which would mean that consciousness makes itself an object for itself, much like the objects of its experience is an object for it. We have seen that, for Sartre, this reflective self-awareness consists of creating and projecting an “ego object,” with which I identify. However, as Sartre points out in The Transcendence of the Ego, by the time of this projection, I would have already escaped the confines of that reflected self-object. In other words, just as in the case of prereflective self-awareness, consciousness is in its object of experience, at a distance from itself. The difference is that in the latter case, the object of experience is constituted to represent consciousness itself. Nevertheless, in both instances of reflective and prereflective self-consciousness, consciousness is directed completely toward the world of its experience.

However, under the gaze, the directionality of this reference turns inward. No longer solely a reference to the world, consciousness, as it is looked at, becomes a “pure self-reference.” “I suddenly hear footsteps in the hall. … I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness.”45 The Other, in “giving” consciousness a “self” (which the Other uses to identify that consciousness as an object in his or her world), causes consciousness to turn back into itself. Instead of having its entire being in an intentionally constituted world, consciousness finds itself with itself, trapped in the physical body-object that the Other sees.46 This purity of reference opposes what would constitute a prereflective self-awareness, the latter being self-consciousness through a pure reference to the object of experience. On the contrary, in being seen by the Other, consciousness purely refers to itself. To be sure, I am never my being-for-others in the sense that this book is “this book.” This is the difference between the two modes of being identified in Sartre’s ontology (being-for-itself and being-in-itself). Amidst the purity of reference to its objectified seen being, there is still that distance between consciousness and the objectified “self” that it is for the Other. There is also a distance between consciousness and the ego-object into which it projects itself during reflective self-awareness. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference between the distance across which I am shamefully self-aware of by objectified seen-being, and the distance across which I am reflectively self-aware. Consciousness is able to recognize itself in its ego in a way that is precisely impossible when it comes to its being for-the-Other. It is the precise nature of this difference, and the sense in which there is a pure reference between consciousness and an essentially alien “self,” which is of issue.

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