Hawkinson's (critical) intervention into the terrain more or less owned by Lacanian theory is singular because of its rigorous commitment to sustaining the collapse of the boundary separating the empirical and the transcendental. Blindspot recognizes—indeed celebrates—the inescapability of a cofunctioning of "natural" perception and technically extended perception; it thus appropriates (or better, restores) the external imaging of the body as part of the body's constituting power.
Blindspot does not simply present an image of Hawkinson's body; rather, it images his body from the standpoint of that body (or better, of the organism that appears as that body). The image—which depicts what he can't see with his eyes—forms the strict correlate of what he can see and what, for that reason, does not require depiction. At the limit, then, the image of the body presented in Blindspot is not an image of the body, but rather an expression of the power (a power of imaging) that belongs to the embodied organism insofar as it is an "originarily" technical being.
Hawkinson's image thus makes common cause with French philosopher Raymond Ruyer's dismissal of the body as a merely scientific—that is, objectivized and external—entity, a kind of epiphenomenon of (radical) subjectivity:
We are therefore, like all beings, pure subjectivities. Our organism (excluding the nervous system) is a set of subjectivities of a different order from conscious subjectivity. We are an object only in appearance; our body is an object only abstractly, in the subjectivity of those who observe us (or even, partially, in our subjectivity, when we see ourselves in a mirror or when we encounter ourselves as a particular image in our visual field). We are not, and other beings are not any more than us, really incarnate. Mind-body dualism is illusory because we do not have a body, because our organism is not a body.¹1
Despite appearances, Ruyer does not so much deny the (physical) reality of embodiment as displace it in favor of an ontological understanding of radical, indeed "originary," subjectivity. The body as object, along with incarnation and “conscious subjectivity," belongs to a derivative ontological plane, one that emerges from the primordial subjectivity-or, rather, the set of subjectivities—comprising the (human) organism.x
INTRODUCTION
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