I have crossed an ocean, a hemisphere, and the continents which cleave them, in pursuit–of what?–perhaps scarcely more than some new means by which to see the infinitely visible things of this world. This world, in which to see is surely to doubt whether what is visible can so easily, so freely be given to sight. Yet, no sooner have I commenced my search for the key to this newly invented, or yet-to-be invented vision machine, than I find that I, myself, am seeing blind, while all that surrounds me here, to the very last object, each lurid thing–the putrid, yawning delta, the too-slow passing train, the indifferent cascades, the green fronds laden with rain, the visages of these people with their distorted will and their contortions of everyday reason–all of it sees me in every dimension, sees all aspects of me indiscriminately, dissolves me in the vast and ruthlessly indifferent regard of its from-every-here-this-ness [de su Überhierhindiesigkeit], so oblique and so ubiquitous as to sieze me and immobilize me in my vivid blindness. Should I not soon find a way to see them back, these relentlessly seeing things, I shall perish unseen and inconsequential on this cruel frontier. (II, 1a)

[GLOSS: An Orion for the mid-20th C.? Or “hunter of shadows, himself a shade” (Homer)? One-eyed vagrant set out to regain his sight in land of setting sun? Or rogue meta-phenomenologist, theorist of some aberrant haecceity… or is it rather a kind of quiddity and its hypokeimenon to which V refers? What to do with his strange notion of univocity: on one hand, “…quid sit in hoc lapide per quod sicut per fundamentum proximum simpliciter repugnat sibi dividi in plura, quorum quodlibet sit ipsum, qualis divisio est propria toti universali in suas partes subiectivas?” (Scotus, Ordinatio II, d. 3, p. 1. q. 2, n. 48); on other hand, question of “intrinsic modalities of being, passing from one ‘individual’ to another, circulating and communicating underneath matters and forms” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 38)