ABSTRACT
In a recent article on contemporary celebrity culture, Jeremy Gilbert describes the psychological appeal of celebrities in terms of Lacanian misrecognition:
Just as the infant sees in her reflection an image of autonomous and self-contained integrity, so different from the state of confusion which she experiences as herself, so the fan sees in the star an image of perfect autonomy, public agency, smooth-edged self-completion. Lacan famously describes this phantasmatic relationship of subject to reflection as a misrecognition. Celebrities in the public domain, according to such a view, function as fantasy objects, images of impossible perfection which hold out the lure of a fully-achieved selfhood to subjects constituted by their perpetual search for just such impossible/absent 'fullness' (Gilbert, 2004: 91).
