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For each object, just as for each painting in an art gallery, there is an optimal distance from which it asks to be seen--an orientation through which it presents more of itself--beneath or beyond which we merely have a confused perspective due to excess or lack. Hence, we tend toward the maximum of visibility and we seek, just as when using a microscope, a better focus point, which is obtained through a certain equilibrium between the interior and the exterior horizons...The distance between me and the object is not a size that increases or decreases, but rather a tension that oscillates around a norm. The oblique orientation of the object in relation to me is not measured by the angle that it forms with the plane of my face, but rather experienced as a disequilibrium, as an unequal distribution of its influences upon me...If I bring the object closer to me, or if I turn it around in my fingers in order to 'see it better,' this is because every attitude of my body is immediately for me a power for a certain spectacle, because each spectacle is for me what it is within a certain kinesthetic situation, and because, in other words, my body is permanently stationed in front of things in order to perceive them and, inversely, appearances are always enveloped for me within a certain bodily attitude...not through a law or from a formula, but rather insofar as I have a body and insofar as I am, through this body, geared into a world. And just as perceptual attitudes are not known by me individually, but rather implicitly given as stages in the gesture that lead to the optimal attitude, correlatively the perspectives that correspond to them are not thematized before me one after the other and are only presented as pathways toward the thing itself with its size and its form...The system of experience is not spread out before me as if I were God, it is lived by me from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator of it, I am a part of it, and it is my inherence in a point of view that at once makes possible the finitude of my perception and its opening to the total world as the horizon of all perception...In other words, perceptual experiences are linked together, motivate each other, and are involved in each other...The world is an open and indefinite unity in which I am situated.
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