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" Schilder observes that, smoking a pipe before a mirror, I feel the sleek, burning surface of the wood not only where my fingers are but also in those otherwordly figures, those merely visible ones inside the mirror. The mirror's phantom draws my flesh into the outer world, and at the same time the invisible of my body can invest its psychic energy in the other bodies I see. Hence my body can include elements drawn from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is a mirror for man. Mirrors are the instruments of a universal magic that converts things into spectacle, spectacle into things, myself into another and another into myself. "

Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics


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Maurice Merleau-Ponty quote : Schilder observes that, smoking a pipe before a mirror, I feel the sleek, burning surface of the wood not only where my fingers are but also in those otherwordly figures, those merely visible ones inside the mirror. The mirror's phantom draws my flesh into the outer world, and at the same time the invisible of my body can invest its psychic energy in the other bodies I see. Hence my body can include elements drawn from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is a mirror for man. Mirrors are the instruments of a universal magic that converts things into spectacle, spectacle into things, myself into another and another into myself.