#subjectivity

There is no sadness and no cruelty in that gaze; it is a gaze without adjectives, it is only, completely, a gaze which neither judges you nor appeals to you; it posits you, implicates you; makes you exist. But this creative gesture is endless; you keep on being born, you are sustained, carried to the end of a movement which is one of infinite origin, source, and which appears in an eternal state of suspension. God and the emperor had the power of the hand, man has the gaze. All history reaches the grandeur of its own mystery in an endless look.

Spirit is never an object; nor a spiritual reality an objective one. In the so-called objective world there's no such nature, thing, or objective reality as spirit. Hence it is easy to deny the reality of spirit.

I have a body in the form of a human animal. I have desires, aversions, and beliefs that arise from reflecting on myself and the world and making judgments about them. I have language and reason, which I can use to communicate and make inferences. I have memories of past experiences and imaginings of possible future experiences. I have connections to other people — parents, ancestors, friends, and lovers. I have a story of myself that is all of these things put together into a single narrative.

“If, as Catharine MacKinnon states in the essay cited earlier on, ‘sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away’ (p. 515), that which is most personal and at the same time most socially determined, most defining of the self and most exploited or controlled, then to ask the question of what constitutes female sexuality, for women and for feminism (the emphasis is important), is to come to know things in a different way, and to come to know them as political. Since one ‘becomes a woman’ through the experience of sexuality, issues such as lesbianism, contraception, abortion, incest, sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, and pornography are not merely social (a problem for society as a whole) or merely sexual (a private affair between ‘consenting adults’ or within the privacy of the family); for women, they are political and epistemological. ‘To feminism, the personal is epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics’ (p. 535). This is the sense in which it is possible to argue as MacKinnon does, that consciousness raising is a ‘critical method,’ a specific mode of apprehension or ‘appropriation’ of reality. The fact that today the expression ‘consciousness raising’ has become dated and more than slightly unpleasant, as any word will that has been appropriated, diluted, digested and spewed out by the media, does not diminish the social and subjective impact of a practice—the collective articulation of one's experience of sexuality and gender—which has produced, and continues to elaborate, a radically new mode of understanding the subject’s relation to social-historical reality. Consciousness raising is the original critical instrument that women have developed toward such understanding, the analysis of social reality, and its critical revision. The Italian feminists call it ‘autocoscienza,’ selfconsciousness, and better still, self consciousness. For example, Manuela Fraire: ‘the practice of self consciousness is the way in which women reflect politically on their own condition.’”[33]