Bersani: subjectivity

“The experience [Marcel’s waking described in the first few pages] is one in which he loses his sense both of his own identity and of the identity of the external world.” (21)
• “He has to recognize the place if he is to know who he is; knowledge of the self, he suggests, depends on an ability to find the self in the external world.”
o this doesn’t seem like quite the right emphasis.
• “empty appartus” [Marcel’s description of self at III 466 (Fugitive), cited by Bersani on 21)

I 84 (zone of evaporation quote) Bersani comments on it on page 32

“...in the process of learning to identify objects immediately, we collect groups of identifying labels that apply to general categories of objects or sensory perceptions. In the strictest sense, no two objects and no two impressions ever resemble each other exactly, and the names we apply to them can quickly becomes like worn-out metaphors that hide from us the specificity of this object or this impression. Names give us a false epistemological security; we need them in order to organize, communicate, and act on our experience in the world, but they encourage us to take what are really approximate analogies for exact knowledge of particular things. In a sense, then, it can be argued that the frankly mistaken identification of an object serves an extremely useful purpose: by failing to use the conventionally proper name to describe our experience, we may use an analogy that increases our knowledge about this class of objects in general, or reveals how one object differs from apparently similar objects, or at least expresses something specific to the conditions in which we are now experiencing it. [...] To ‘forget’ the names of objects, while it threatens the coarsest kind of immediate control over the world, therefore makes possible a rare openness to the world, a freshness of impressions that finally give us a more complex control over a world whose variety and particularity defy the names we use to describe it.” (206-7)

“Our habitual responses to things not only make us insensitive to the particularities of things in the world; they also block our most profoundly individual responses to the world.” (207)

“The analogies Elstir makes when he looks at nature come from his memories of things already seen, but they are not longer limited to the learned analogies of habit; they are determined by his past perceptions. In general, the arrangements of past images in our minds, their relative strength and weakness, the various connections among them are the unanalyzable conditions that explain why one person’s ‘optical illusions’ cannot consistently be the same as someone else’s. These errors of perception are, then, a spontaneous and concentrated expression of an individual history; they reveal the existence of a particular point of view on the world. They are also metaphors: we identify one thing with an image of something else. Elstir’s paintings, in which the sea is painted in terms of the land and the land in terms of the sea, are essentially visual metaphors.” (207-8)
• is this entirely accurate?

“An involuntary memory testifies to the presence of a past Marcel has mistakenly though of as dead; but it does not create an unbroken continuity between the past and the present. [...] Involuntary memory can therefore provide Marcel with the guarantee that his past is not completely lost, but it cannot supply evidence of a permanent individuality, of the unbroken history of a single personality.” (218)

(III, 256): “...originality...is a proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul.” (cf. 219-20)

“It is as if this could do away with the memory of the world as distinct from the self, as if, under the melting pressure of analysis and comparison, objects could be thoroughly de-objectified and everything made to appear as a metaphor for everything else.” (230)