A gaze is an interruption. What is ‘interrupted’ can either be a continuous activity (eg looking through a keyhole) or a continuous space – a landscape, for example. The interruption ‘embarrasses’ the subject in a peculiar way.
In the example from Sartre that so impresses Lacan, this is what happens: the keyhole spy, voyeur, is cut short, ‘pulled up’ in his activity by a noise*. This noise is enough to re-orientate him, re-compose his space. He is returned to his body and to his self. The noise can be anything, a creaking door, a rustle of branches outside. Suddenly the voyeur is in the visible field, not its clandestine final vanishing point. There is, thus, a kind of ‘exposure’. It is as if the voyeur had been ‘snapped’, captured.
A familiar cinematic sequence: someone scans a landscape with a pair of binoculars or telescope; this scanning follows the pre-given contours, but suddenly this someone spots another pair of binoculars looking straight back, and stops abruptly. Perhaps at first it is only a glint of reflected sunlight – the binoculars see it and immediately track back, fixated. This second pair of binoculars is only the most literal materialisation of the gaze. It represents another ‘centre pin’ from which the visual might be arranged, a rival centre of optical gravity.
But it is not just you that has been seen, exposed; it is your lewd will-to-look. Here it is before you, nude and blushing.
* “far from speaking of the emergence of this gaze as something that concerns the organ of sight, he refers to the sound of rustling leaves, suddenly heard while out hunting, to a footstep heard in a corridor.”
Yes, the perfect images there... The Gaze as the point of sight that eludes the domain of seeing, what must be there for there to be any seeing whatsoever. There is no sight without this impossible point; we can only 'see' because at the far corner someThing else is looking back...
Posted by: RIPope | September 13, 2005 at 04:04 AM
I may have said this before, but my son at a young age had lacanian tendencies. Not only did he weep unconsolably (sp?) when he realized that the Symbolic is the order of the lie (he lied to a friend so as not to hurt his feelings, he was just 3 at the time), but he also (at 5) started puzzling over the fact that he couldn't see the place from which he looked. I hope he doesn't get beat up in middle school.
Posted by: Jodi | September 13, 2005 at 05:25 PM
Haha! As I watch my nieces and nephew grow up, I wonder myself how my knowledge of psychoanalysis might inflect my (future, if ever) children's development. Not that I'm saying yours inflected your son's tendencies. Of course one would never tell them why they're doing what they're doing. But children pick up on even the most minute silences, guessing at our desire... our Lacanian-garbled desire. I wonder, I wonder.
Posted by: RIPope | September 14, 2005 at 12:59 AM
Children now are more psychoanalytic than ever.
Posted by: Matt | September 14, 2005 at 01:30 AM
Jodi,
No doubt he'll be staging a number of classic Lacanian scenes, after seeing your approval at the first one. Lacanian theory is his 'eating strawberry cake'!
Posted by: mark | September 14, 2005 at 05:05 AM
yes, his strawberry cake! and, once he likes it, I have to feed him!
Posted by: Jodi | September 14, 2005 at 12:01 PM