The Subject Is a Limit of the World

The Subject Is a Limit of the World (2009) installation, composed of a video camera filming a TV screen displaying the image from the camera and thus creating a feedback loop, is part of What Is Philosophy series. Its title is derived from a Ludwig Wittgenstein quote from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world.”

5.631 There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called The World as l found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.

5.632 The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.

5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.

What Is Philosophy is a series of tongue-in-cheek interpretations of selected concepts in analytic philosophy.