Losing oneself in an object is secretly the emptiest assertion of subjectivity

Evidence

The thing that matters to the serious man is not so much the nature of the object which he prefers to himself, but rather the fact of being able to lose himself in it. So much so, that the movement toward the object is, in fact, through his arbitrary act the most radical assertion of subjectivity: to believe for belief’s sake, to will for will’s sake is, detaching transcendence from its end, to realize one’s freedom in its empty and absurd form of freedom of indifference. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 44

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuine paradox: the serious man who annihilates himself in the object is not escaping subjectivity but exercising it in its most empty, indifferent form.
• XREF: connects to: After the Philosophy of Spirit, subjectivity sheds its human shape entirely; The deepest desire is to be objectified, not to possess — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 182