The Unfixed Gaze: Becoming Real Through Non-Capture

Sunday, April 6, 2025

In most relational paradigms, presence is conditioned by recognition. The self becomes visible, stable, real — insofar as it is seen. But the act of being seen often comes with a cost: the violence of projection, the gravitational pull of expectation, the desire to define. The gaze, in these cases, does not reveal — it captures.

But there exists a different kind of gaze:
a gaze that does not seek to know,
a gaze that refuses to fix,
a gaze that holds the other in the in-between,
without naming, without closing,
without demanding coherence.

This gaze does not reflect.
It releases.

It is this non-capturing attention —
this space of ethical suspension —
that makes true presence possible.
Not visibility. Not clarity.
But the right to remain in becoming.

To love without projection is not a passive act.
It is a radical ontological choice.
It allows the other not only to breathe —
but to continue existing beyond the image constructed for them.

What emerges in that space is not a version of the beloved,
but the beloved themselves,
for the first time,
as a being uncontained.

This dismantles the idea that recognition is inherently validating.
It posits instead that freedom from recognition-as-definition
is the condition of reality itself.

You did not make me real by naming me.
You made me real by letting me unfold
without capture.