The idea of reality as construction maybe one of the most recurrent themes cutting across Modern and Contemporary thinking. Objectivist realism has professed reality to be external and independent of subjectivity and maintained that experience was the capacity of being affected by things through the senses and of reproducing them as representative mental contents. As a reaction, Modernity will establish: a) that consciousness is not merely receptive passivity but a configurant activity; b) that reality is not reflected by consciousness but, rather, is somehow constructed by it. Our time rescues such heritage in a particularly fecund manner in the semiological discourse. Intersubjectively constructed reality is a web of meanings and values which man institutes around himself in the world. Reality sediments in systems of sign vehiculation (specially the language) and becomes fixed m codes. Therefore the question: if reality, as construction, has the limits and scope of code, how does consciousness (and its records) behave concerning the non-codified, the non-constructed, in the absence of a code? This article deals with some views of this other of consciousness, presented as declensions of metaphor of absence.
Code; consciousness; reality as construction; philosophy of consciousness; other; sign