Eyes without Look

Jerry and I are naked most of the time, and we are slowly learning how to see with our bodies. The ass, nipples and genitals are the most sensitive seeing areas, and the lookout is different according to which areas are used. Above all, the popling wants to be seen with other bodies and to see other bodies. When he looks at me with his nipples, my nipples become erect. Today I was in the workshop and the popling came in. He looked at the beams and made a little chirping giggle sound that vibrated in my throat, and then he looked at me with his neck where a red line like a rope mark appeared, and jerked his head to the left and I ejaculated. His whistles and chirps vibrate in my body like some sonar language. (William Burroughs, The Popling)

If one eye can see, so how can it be without look? Spinoza was the first eye without look, a type of blank eye. Not that his eyes were without looks, for example, without beauty, attraction, or even without any depth of field, No! The matter is that he himself was an eye without look. Even his owns eyes were eyes without look. All of his organs were eyes without look. His elbows when hitting something, or his ears when connecting to a sound, or his intestine when connected to some food, or his hair when wind blew, or his legs when stepping on the ground, or the skin of his belly when seeing an image, or his neck when it bent down, and truly speaking, his neck when he walked, his legs when accompanied by the flow of a sound, his belly when wind blew, his hair when stepping on the ground, or his elbow when smelling something, were all and all eyes without look. Spinoza was not really Spinoza. Like Beckett, he too, was a floating particle and in danger, and necessarily in connection and disjunction, in relations with other particles.


Burroughs also squeaks just like Spinoza. Burroughs produces shrills from his eyes that can affect the neck of the other. He laughs, and then his body has a sight, can see, but in fact, cannot see anything. All his body becomes eye, an eye without look, countless eyes without look. Spinoza and Burroughs’s body can face the outside and tremble endlessly; the shrill, the laugh, let pass through and are affected.

Eyes without look not only face the outside, have passion for it, and are ceaselessly affected, and through the outside and affection feel more powerful, but at the same time they neither have a seeing subject nor do they register an object in their memory. Eyes without look lack any function which has a memory and thus they only let pass through and through such passages are affected and feel more powerful. Eyes without look do not see the things. That is why Spinoza says it is right in the middle of things that God turns to everything. Thing itself is an eye without look. The job of eyes without look is to empty out the object of any pre-existent meaning and only through the death of the subject can they become possible. Eyes without look thus simultaneously lack any subjectivity and objectivity. An eye without look only lets pass through and is just affected. Any eye without look ceaselessly lets the looks of other eyes pass through. Since eyes without look lack any look or function, they therefore let the other eyes without look pass through but do not register at all. The matter is when two eyes without look meet each other, the encounter is so intense that friendship is possible to happen: the becoming friend of a walking-ear and a smelling-hand. Hand and ear in this example are not within the bounds of any organism and have lost their pre-existent meanings as well. The becoming friend of eyes without look happens without any language. Eyes without look are connected together in silence; through being affected and affecting each other make their different differences so intense and different from oneself. Eyes without look are not representable, and that is why they are ceaselessly open to becoming smaller, to turning into particles. Representations are to be traced in an eye with look that through registering another eye with look and through language register each other and thus make one another more determining and determinate: structure of long-term memory. But producing eyes without look is the ceaseless processes of being affected without determination. It is a kind of friendship, a kind of commonness, a singular commoner, and production in silence, in the absence of representation, in concealment, in the absence of another eye without look whose being without look, when confronting or passing through each other, not only does not realize any presence, but immediately, in silence and absence, reach such an intensity and affection that can even dispose the eyes without look of look. One ought to know eyes without look by how intense they affect and are affected, and by the affect and affection behind which there is no subject present to be affected by an outside object. That is why eyes without look are singular and without any determined, pre-established subject and object and in silence are present at the absence of other eyes without look in the processes of production – a presence that can be nothing but absence.

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