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THE FASCINATING OBJECT

by Marcus Steinweg

An object that fascinates—what kind of object is that?  What does fascination mean?  Fascinationm marks  the split between  subject  and  object.  To be precise,  it  confronts the  subject with its objectness. It heterogenizes the subject, reconciles  it with basic heterogeny. Fascination objectifies the subject;  it hollows  it out, de-substantiates it, forces it over to the other side—to the side of the object—so that it can grasp that this side is the only one that  exists—the  only existing  world—so  long  as  the  subject  remains completely beholden to it, even as it insists on keeping  a distance  from the object reality. The  fascinating object  is the  subject-turned-object  that  casts  a spell, transforming the subjects  it encounters into objects. To fall under  an object’s spell is to become an object. The fascinating subject leads the subject beyond itself. Not into submission, but into a kind of self-objectification that  the  subject  reconciles  with  its inconsistency, with the ontological impotence that  marks  its being, with the material dust that it is, with the contingency that it owes itself to, with the arbitrariness of the situation into which it strays, with the opaque  future  it moves within  and with its dark origins, which  it dismisses  as cosmic coincidence and  a singularity freed from meaning. In fascination, the subject  becomes  familiar  with its incommensurability and indefiniteness, with its—however culturally mediated—naturalness and materiality, so that it begins to identify itself as an object among objects. Fascination is the gaze of things directed at us. In it, the hierarchy of subject and object crumbles.  Correlationism dissolves. Fascination  constitutes the  community of things—their cosmic  connectedness—through a divided  fate,  the pathos  of which  minimizes  awareness of the  indifference of energetic  processes:  There  are only objects, there is no given sense.

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