Yesterday's proposition made me think about something Nietzsche wrote in The Twilight of Idols, which perhaps makes an interesting addition to Barthes' punctum:

"Learning to see - getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you; postponing judgment, learning to encompass and take stock of an individual case from all sides. This is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is close to what an unphilosophical way of speaking calls a strong will: the essential thing here is precisely not 'to will', to be able to suspend the decision. Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist stimulus - you have to react, to follow every impulse. In many cases this sort of compulsion is already a pathology, a decline, a symptom of exhaustion, - almost everything that is crudely and unphilosophically designated a 'vice' is really just this physiological inability not to react. - A practical application of having learned to see: your learning process in general becomes slow, mistrustful, reluctant. You let foreign things, new things of every type, come towards you while assuming an initial air of calm hostility, - you pull your hand away from them. To keep all doors open, to lie on your stomach, prone and servile before every little fact, to be constantly poised and ready to put yourself into - plunge yourself into - other things, in short, to the espouse the modern 'objectivity' - all this is in bad taste, it is ignobility par excellence." (190-1)

and a future anterior