ABSTRACT
This chapter differentiates the gaze from the look, and hence from masculinity and provides a theoretical articulation of the field of vision within which every subject is necessarily held. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's cinema does more than exteriorize the gaze; it separates it from its usual support, the look, a dislocation which has extreme consequences for sexual difference. At least two Fassbinder films suggest that it is no more possible to die without a confirming gaze than it is to assume an identity. Fassbinder further denaturalizes identity by emphasizing at every conceivable juncture its imaginary bases. The insistent specularization of the male subject in Fassbinder's cinema functions not only to desubstantialize him, but to prevent any possibility of mistaking his penis for the phallus, a dislocation which is at the center of Fassbinder's "aesthetics of pessimism." The chapter demonstrates that when the male look is contextualized within the framework of the primal scene, it represents the site of trauma and dispossession.
