Chapter 14 ‘The Lost Object of Hallucinatory Satisfaction’

The concrete is the abstract rendered familiar through use.

In order to help the reader get a feeling of how difficult the metapsychological approach of perception seems to us to be, we will refer to Rémy Chauvin (1992) who, in La biologie de l’esprit, describes the encounter between a flower, the orchid and a species of wasp, the Gorytes.

In this species, the male is born before the female and searches desperately for a partner until the moment it notices on an orchid's corolla a rather precise form representing a wasp, in its own image. And when it settles on the corolla, a smell similar to that of the females in its species rises from the bottom of the orchid. Without hesitating, the Gorytes plunges in and starts wiggling. By stirring up the masses of pollen, it makes them stick to the pistil and the flower is pollinated. It is not until a month later that the female Gorytes are born, but the orchids have already faded.

Such, then, with their overtly sexual content, are the unexpected relations between the perceiving Gorytes and the perceived orchid! What sort of perception, what sort of memory, what sort of temporality are we dealing with here? Is the relation between the perceiver and the perceived one of a discovery? The orchid may have already discovered the Gorytes in the past; the Gorytes, for its part, does not discover the orchid, it only perceives its own image in it.

‘You would not seek for me if you did not possess me’, runs Pascal's astonishing formula in his Pensées (1966). Comparable to the story of the Gorytes, the drama of perception is that man is only able to perceive when he

is goaded by the absence of his object of satisfaction, when he is searching for an object, lost forever, of which he will only be able to find again a mark, a misleading message, a lure.

The gap between what is perceived by the perceiver and the object cannot be bridged. The perceiving subject will forever be af