With the invention of digital photography, yesterday and today have coexisted with unprecedented intensity. It’s as if the waste chute in a building has been blocked off and all the trash just keeps piling up forever. There’s no need to save film, just press the shutter release, even the deleted pictures remain in the computer’s long memory. Oblivion, the copycat of nonexistence, has a new twin brother; the dead memory of the collector. We look through a family album with a sense of affection–it contains a little, perhaps just what remains. But what should we do with an album containing everything, without exception, the whole disproportionate volume of the past?
— Maria Stepanova, from In Memory of Memory: A Romance, transl. Sasha Dugdale (New Directions, 2018)
— Maria Stepanova, from In Memory of Memory: A Romance, transl. Sasha Dugdale (New Directions, 2018)
Everything that we are aware of—and can possibly know—is contained within our own consciousness. It’s impossible for us to get “outside” of our consciousness because it defines the boundaries of our personal universe. The so-called real world of objects existing in space and time initially exists only as objects of my consciousness....We act as if the space-time world is primary and our immediate consciousness is secondary. This is an inversion of the way things actually are: It is our consciousness that is primary and the space-time world that is secondary, existing fundamentally as the object of our consciousness.
The Self Is Embodied Subjectivity: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty
The Self Is Embodied Subjectivity: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty