ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors develop some propositions regarding the way in which film theory in a specific historical moment reappropriated the Lacanian conception of the Imaginary register and the visual more generally. A reconsideration of this theoretical debate will help us to move from a purely descriptive account of the constitution of the visual field to an enquiry as to whether the production of moving images can potentially re-articulate it. In the years when the study of cinema was moving from an analysis of the filmic enunciated contents to the process of cinematic enunciation, Jean-Louis Baudry was one of the first to develop a consistent theory of the cinematographic apparatus. Baudry underlines a fundamental characteristic that was already implied in the mirror stage: the mirror is an ideological mystification. The issue of the relations between the elements and the meta-level of their foundation in Lacanian structuralism was developed by Alain Badiou in Theory Subject in a very enlightening way.
