| Chapter 1: | Blindness, or What Is This No-Thing We See? |
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brain that processes the information. But the only way in which the image is formed is for some of the light to be absorbed by the image itself (otherwise, all we would see is pure light, an imageless brightness). This means that there is always some part of the object—the letter, the word, or the series of words—that remains unseen, that remains in the dark.
What we are interested in is this residue, this that is left behind—the ghost of the word that remains unseen: perhaps the only way which we can see the dark is to be blind in the first place.
Just because something does not appear to be there does not mean that it isn't there, does not mean that it isn't experienced as being there. In many cases, something that is absent—or, more precisely, that appears to be absent—can affect us just as much as something that is present:
“Ow!” he yelled. “Don't do that!”
“What's the matter?”
“Don't do that,” he repeated. “I had just got my fingers around the cup handle when you pulled it. That really hurts!”
Hold on a minute. I wrench a real cup from phantom fingers and the person yells, ouch! The fingers were illusory, but the pain was real—indeed, so intense that I dared not repeat the experiment. 2
If an absent limb can affect one, can it really be all that absent? Is it not the trace of the limb—be it via psychological effects, or even physiological ones 3 —that continues to haunt the body: the spectre of John's fingers that continue to be with him, inscribing themselves into his body, but this time not necessarily within his control? John's spectral fingers are absent in a cognitive sense—he no