consciousnesslessness

Joyce has, therefore, undertaken here to study the subconscious mind in its most unimpeded forms. To this state of semiconsciousness (I am sure Mr. Joyce would relish this name for it: consciousnesslessness), the author, we are told, applies Vico’s theories.

[1929 fall, Harold J. Salemson, “James Joyce and the New Word”, in V. F. Calverton [pseudonym; George Goetz], S[amuel] D. Schmalhausen, editors, The Modern Quarterly, volume V, number 3, Baltimore, Md.: Modern Quarterly, →OCLC, section I (Situation), page 296

To behold and to be beheld like that established an old fact in front of a new fact as soon as the latter became newer than the former, and as soon as the one and then the other became known to the first and then the other of these two odd boys where they happened to find themselves in mutual states of consciousnesslessness, about equally mindless and insouciant, not unlike that of two dead human beings who had just begun to understand what happened, and how everything had remarkably become different.

2008, Michael Heffernan, “Every Journey Has an End”, in The Odor of Sanctity, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare: Salmon Poetry, →ISBN, page 96

[I]t would be necessary to examine […] the fact that collective consciousness (all collective consciousness, in particular that of the people, the first figure whereby spirit exits abstraction and becomes “actually real”) is both Selbstbewusstsein and Bewusstlosigkeit (which should be translated as “a-consciousness” or “consciousnesslessness” rather than as “unconsciousness” and a fortiori as “unconscious”), the one being the necessary flipside or counterpart of the other. In the course of the Phenomenology [of Spirit], the notion of consciousnesslessness always characterizes a still abstract universal or a universal that belongs to the register of being but not reflexivity. […] consciousnesslessness comes to designate what separates community from its own realization or from rising to its own concept, […]

2016 November (indicated as 2017), Étienne Balibar, translated by Steven Miller, “Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit’s Dictum”, in Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, New York, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, →ISBN, part II (Being(s) in Common)