ABSTRACT
The immediate realisation of the narcissistic model brings about its disruption, the dissociation of the gaze and recognition. The mirror of Alice Through the Looking-Glass can be taken as a model in order to address the passage from specularity to the Real of the gaze as conceptualised by Jacques Lacan from the middle of the 1960s: that objection that jeopardises the pure transparency of the mirror. The gaze is actually the symptom of the break between the objective and formalised notion of space, and the highly subjectivised and libidinal one. Merleau-Ponty's elaboration of the concept will nevertheless be very different than what Lacan developed in his seminar in 1964. Gaze is the opaque part of the mirror that suddenly from a pure transparency starts to hide something, but it is also the totality of the narcissistic image when, at the peak of its successfulness, its very homeliness starts to morph into an uncanny double.
