Consciousness as Excess

In any occasion of perceptual experience, the perception of an object entails some contact between subject and object, either immediate, e. g. touch, or mediate, e. g. seeing, via light waves. It is also common for a perceptual moment to be interrupted, e. g. either by the subject's being distracted by some other perceptual object, or it occurring to one that there is something else to do. Some simple reflection on these facets on experience seems to reveal that in the perception of an object, the subject is both momentarily unified in some respect with the object, and distinct from it as well. So, this mundane evidence seems to challenge a fundamental analysis of Sartre's. For, as he argues, the Consciousness of an object is also the Consciousness of Consciousness; the Consciousness of Consciousness is the Consciousness of not being the object; therefore, Consciousness is essentially a Nothingness. But, the example demonstrates that the Consciousness of an Object entails a unity between subject and object, a unity which the further detachment of subject from object does not undo, but adds to. So, the more accurate description of the relation between Consciousness and an object is that Consciousness both is and is not that object. Indeed, when Sartre characterizes Knowledge as a type of possession, and possession as a mode of Being in which the subject both is and is not its object, he seems to agree with the revised description. On the other hand, he often seems to treat this double relation as paradoxical, and as an indication that Consciousness is a lack of Being. But, as mundane experience demonstrates, that Consciousness both is and is not its object is simply because Consciousness is more than its object. If so, than Consciousness is not a lack, but an excess, or, as Sartre puts it in Nausea, it is de trop.