ABSTRACT
Lacanian film theory of the 1970s limited itself to vision and based itself primarily on the specular relation of the imaginary to subjectivity as, famously, illustrated and enacted by the mirror stage. This theory, in conjunction with the Renaissance perspectival image, constructed the look as all-powerful, conferring upon the (implicitly male) film spectator an all-perceiving/not perceived (that is, voyeuristic) status. Yet, this initial theory of the look (as a function of the imaginary) already by the time it became widely discussed and applied in film theory, had been superseded in Lacanian psychoanalysis (specifically, with Seminar XI) by the theory of the gaze, the gaze as objet petit a. As Lacan stated, “The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze” (1977: 105)1 and as Todd McGowan reminds us:
The objet petit a is (…) a lost object, an object that the subject separates itself from in order to constitute itself as a desiring subject. It is the loss of the object that inaugurates the process of desiring, and the subject desires on the basis of this loss. The subject is incomplete or lacking because it doesn’t have this object, though the object only exists insofar as it is missing. (2007: 6)
To the extent that it is constituted by desire – a desire, ultimately, for the lost object – vision is not all-perceiving but is deficient, for it is (like all symbolic systems) based on lack; the object resists mastery; it is unachievable. Whereas the imaginary look seemingly conferred visual mastery on the perceiving subject by making everything visible, the gaze (as what is lacking in the image, as objet petit a) introduces the unseen into the field of vision. McGowan again: “The gaze compels
our look because it appears to offer access to the unseen, to the reverse side of the visible. It promises the subject the secret of the Other, but this secret exists only insofar as it remains hidden” (ibid.). The gaze is constituted on the invisible, or, more accurately, the unrepresentable, which exists in the realm of the Real. It is what the symbolic is structured around, without being able to represent.
