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But we seem to have arrived back where we started. The core claim of Zhuangzi, Spinoza and Girard is that when we seek our selves – when we strive for an identity of our own – we end up finding another: a model to guide our being. The path that leads away from identity seems to lead to exactly the same place – to the other, with whom we are invited to ‘merge arcanely’. The difference is that now we find what we were seeking, rather than the very opposite. If you look for yourself, you will only find another. If you look for others, there they are all around you. When we stop looking for ourselves in others, we will see them as they really are. I believe that we have barely begun to live in the world together. 

“We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. […] Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

Where do you go to be seen? To be seen as something other than a more-or-less monstrous imitation, an imaginary being. Where do you go to be seen apart from tests of legitimacy that turn you into an imaginary being?

The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.