ABSTRACT
Certain familiar receptions of Lacan's theory of the gaze in American and British film theory have merged, the male gaze taken as the active, conscious agent of seeing. Lacan said of the gaze: The foundation of the surface is at the base of all people call the organization of form, constellation. The phallus is this particular signifier which, in the body of signifiers, is specialized to designate the ensemble of the effects of the signifier, as such, on the signified. The scopic drive is constructed as a symbolic dimension convention and in individual imaginary preferences, in the real, it is a jouissance constellation of certain traces. Lacan called Descartes's "extended body" the statement of an impasse, as was Plato's concept of an ideal form. In Lacan's gaze, The Line and the Light, can be understood insofar as geometrical optics invert perspective in painting such that, the secret of a picture, catches the viewer in its trap.
