Possession

Possession is the affective and intentional relation in which something can be given to consciousness as already present without being known as a fully represented object or physically attained. It helps explain how feeling can be directed toward an absent person, how an image can make an absent thing present without turning it into a real object, and how an artwork can be apprehended through its material support while remaining irreducible to that support. Across these cases, possession names a mode of access that is at once intimate and incomplete: what is present points beyond itself to what is not there.

Affective Possession

Possession begins not with ownership in the ordinary sense but with the structure of feeling. In the example of an absent person whose beautiful white hands have left an impression, the feeling is not a sealed, subjective content. It transcends itself toward those hands, though it does not posit them as hands composed of clearly represented qualities. Instead, the feeling gives them an individual affective form: fine, graceful, and pure. Particular details—the tint of the skin at the fingertips, the shape of the fingernails, and the small wrinkles around a phalanx—may be present, but they arrive as an undifferentiated mass that cannot be made fully descriptive. The hands are therefore given affectively, not as an inventory of known features.

This affective presence is already a kind of possession. The feeling is not empty or merely directed toward an object from which it remains entirely separate; the hands are given to consciousness in their affective form. Yet this does not mean that they are physically present or known in a complete representative sense. Possession names the distinctive closeness of the feeling to its object while preserving the difference between affective access and ordinary knowledge.

Desire extends this structure. It is directed toward an object, but in the stipulated case of desire without knowledge, it cannot by itself identify or represent that object. After a tiring, sleepless night, a definite desire may arise whose affective character is determinate even though its object is not. It may be impossible to tell whether the desire is for a warm, sweet drink, sleep, or something sexual. Attempts to settle the question by hypothesis do not succeed, because the desire’s object exists only as the correlate of that affective consciousness, not as one of those identifiable real things.

Desire is thus described as an effort to possess on the representative plane what is already given on the affective plane. It senses a beyond that it cannot know, and treats its affective something as representative of the thing desired. This explains why the structure approaches that of imaging consciousness: in both, a present synthesis serves in place of a representative synthesis that is absent. The resemblance does not make feeling and image identical; it shows how affective possession can supply the underlying pattern for an image.

Presence, Absence, and the Image

The mental image makes the structure especially clear because its object is absent within its very presence. In a cognitive-affective synthesis, knowledge may identify the affectively given object as two white, fine hands, while feeling supplies an opacity and particularity that bare knowledge cannot convey. The present substitute gives those hands in a concrete, full way, but it cannot exist by itself as the hands it makes accessible. It gives them and, in doing so, directs consciousness toward the hands that have not yet come into existence. Possession therefore does not erase absence; the absent object is reached through a present correlate that remains distinct from it.

The example of the Panthéon makes the tension between presence and absence more explicit. Imaging consciousness may aim at the building as a Greek temple, with grey colour, columns, and a triangular pediment. Those qualities are affectively present in a certain manner, and for a moment consciousness can seem to be in the Panthéon’s presence. Yet the Panthéon exists elsewhere and is given precisely as existing elsewhere. What is present is its absence, held through the image rather than replaced by a smaller real temple inside consciousness.

A tempting explanation turns the image into a miniature object that possesses the represented building’s sensible qualities. On that account, a lesser, phantasmal grey would stand in for the Panthéon’s actual grey, and the image would be a real object that consciousness could inspect. This construction produces the illusion of immanence: qualities that are externalized as imaginary are mistakenly treated as real but non-externalized qualities belonging to an inner substitute. The result is an apparent object that seems available for description, counting, or observation. But although the represented columns seem there, they cannot actually be counted as features of a real object present to perception. Possession is not a license to treat the absent thing as physically available; it marks the peculiar access by which absence can be lived through a present analogon.

Image, Reflection, and the Limits of Description

The account depends on distinguishing consciousness of an object as imaged from reflective consciousness of having an image. When someone produces an image of Pierre, Pierre is the object of the current consciousness. So long as that consciousness remains unchanged, description concerns the object as imaged, not the image as an image. A further reflective act is needed to turn attention toward how the object is given and to support the judgment that there is an image. This distinction prevents possession from being reduced to an unnoticed inner picture: the object aimed at and the reflective recognition of an image belong to different acts.

Reflection, on this account, supplies certain data about the image, while explanatory theories about its nature remain hypotheses with varying probability. A psychological description should therefore begin by fixing what reflection makes immediately evident rather than assuming in advance that the image is a miniature perception or a store of represented qualities. This methodological caution matters for possession because the concept concerns how an object is given, not simply what hidden mental object might be said to contain it.

A schematic drawing offers a related illustration of how an object can emerge through directed activity rather than through a complete set of represented parts. Three segments, a point, and a sinuous line can first be organized as abstract lines and figures; under a changed intention they may be read as a face, with the segments interpreted as forehead, eyebrow, and nose, the point as an eye, and the sinuous line as mouth and chin. The viewer’s eye movements help organize the figure, and an absent connection between separate groups of lines is enacted rather than literally drawn. This example is not itself identified as possession, but it clarifies the broader contrast between a sparse present medium and the fuller object toward which consciousness is directed.

Aesthetic Possession

The account of art extends possession from personal feeling and mental imagery to aesthetic experience. A painted Charles VIII is not identical with the canvas, frame, or layers of paint. The aesthetic object appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude; it cannot be given to realizing consciousness as though it were simply another physical feature of the painting. The real canvas is the material analogon through which the depicted figure is apprehended, while the object of aesthetic appreciation is an irreality.

The artist does not, in this account, transfer a private mental image into a real object that the public can then inspect. Brushstrokes, impasto, canvas grain, and varnish are real, but they are not, as such, the object called beautiful. The painter constructs a material analogon through which an imaging consciousness can grasp an irreal object. Each stroke belongs to the effort to manifest that irreal whole; the painting is a material thing that is visited by the painted object when a spectator takes up the imaging attitude. The distinction explains how the work can depend on a real support without its aesthetic object becoming that support.

Sensual pleasure in a real colour is likewise distinct from aesthetic appreciation. A red encountered in nature may produce pleasure of the senses, but the red in a painting is grasped as part of an irreal whole, such as the red of a rug near a table. Its woollen, tactile character and its relation to the green of a wall contribute to the represented world in which the colour has its aesthetic sense. Even in cubist painting, where ordinary representation is reduced, forms can be apprehended as things with density, matter, depth, and perspective. They remain irreal objects manifested through the canvas, not real objects contained in it.

This is the source of aesthetic vision’s disinterestedness: aesthetic enjoyment is real, but it is not directed at the physical painting as a colour-producing object. It helps constitute and apprehend the imaginary object through the canvas. The same distinction applies to performance. An actor playing Hamlet need not believe, in the sense of positing himself as the real character, that he is Hamlet; nevertheless, his feelings, strength, gestures, and even real tears can serve as analogons for the character’s conduct and emotions. The actor is not made into the character as a real person. Rather, he is irrealized in the character, and the audience apprehends the tears as Hamlet’s within the fictional world. Across these forms, possession names neither literal incorporation nor simple resemblance, but the way a present medium can give access to an irreal object while keeping its absence and distinctness intact.