phantasma

What the play produces is not an object. Whatever was given in advance gets worked over and therefore cannot be the constitutive condition of what results, so the figuration has no object-quality at all. In the phenomenological vocabulary it can be called a phantasma: it gives itself as non-present, it resists the demand to be taken for present, it carries irreality from the outset, and its primary function is to stand for something else. It has no materiality, and it is neither a copy nor a hallucination.

This is the most precise description available of what early stop actually produces, and it is better than calling the result unfinished. An image halted partway through denoising is not a damaged picture of something; it is a figuration presenting itself as not-present, which is why -ness can look complete and still refuse to be about any particular thing. In the phantasma the resistance that difference puts up against being mediated shows itself — which is why the affirmation is withdrawn from whatever the figuration seemed to disclose. The play is over; but because it can be played again, what results is not a settled reception but a partial one, and what is not there founds a different kind of repeatability by appearing at all.