Reading questions for March 9:
How is the gaze linked to repetition compulsion?
How is the eye distinguished from the gaze? Is the eye in the register of the Imaginary and the gaze of the Real?
"object a is covered over by the other's image, and that is necessary if my semblabe is to arouse my desire" (Quinet 140).
The function of the screen is to erase the gaze from the world.
Of what use can the concept of the gaze be for us? Zizek is instructive here: "Imaginary identification is identification of the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing 'what we would like to be,' and symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love" (SOI 105). The former is identification with the image, the latter identification with the gaze. Where is this place? Lacan says that the gaze is situated in the register of the real. It is associated with object a. Object a (remembering that Fink says (91) at this stage in Lacan's thinking a (italicized) is Imaginary as opposed to the later reformulated object (a), which is the real cause, not an image or object of any sort) is the (non)"image" of the real, the Imaginary postulation of the real as really having existed? Is object a the screen that masks the impossibility of the sexual relationship? It is that Thing in fantasy that stands for desire, initiates desire, fills in the hole in the Other created by castration. Can we say of object a that it is the unsymbolizeable in an image that initiates an encounter with the real? I'm thinking of Lacan's example of the child watching his brother suck his mother's breast. It is not the breast (object) he wants, but rather that image of wholeness recalls something prior to castration and thus prior to the symbolic. Does the child give his brother the evil eye?
Zizek continues: "imaginary identificatiion is always identificatioin on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other. So, apropos of every imitation of a model-image, apropos of every 'playing the role,' the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting this role? Which gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself with a certain image? This gap between the way I see myself and the point from which I am being observed to appear likeable to myself is crucial for grasping hysteria...when we take the so-called hysterical woman in the act of a theatrical outburst, it is of course clear that she is doing this to offer herself to the Ohter as the object of its desire, but concrete analysis has to discover who - which subject - embodies for her the Other. Behind an extremely 'feminine' imaginary figure, we can thus generally discover some kind of masculine, paternal identification: she is enacting fragile femininity, but on the symbolic level she is in fact identified with the paternal gaze, to which she wants to appear likeable" (106).
See Zizek 107 for illustrative examples.
See Reading Seminar XI pg. 188
"The first set of splits or cuts - primary separations from maternal objects - constitute what we experience as an imaginary body. And its palpable scars give rise to object a as any fantasy objects by which individuals imagine themselves as whole. Lacan calls this level of visual apprehension the stain, or the psychic point in the scopic function where the split between the gaze and vision is found." (RS XI 200)
also see 202, last paragraph.
Lacan, 77: "In so far as the gaze, qua object a, may come to symbolize this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of castration, and in so far as it is an object a reduced, of its nature, to a punctiform, evanescent funtion, it leaves the subject in ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance, an ignorance so characteristic of all progress in thought that occurs in the way constituted by philosophical research."
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dolar 64-65: There is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity.
66-67: screen, automatons.
70: "The object a is precisely that part of the loss that one cannot see in the mirror, the part of the subject that has no mirror reflection, the nonspecular."
72: 'The source of the uncanny is the reappearance of a part that was necessarily lost with the emergence of the subject...the point where the real immediately coincides with the symbolic to be put into the service of the imaginary. So what is uncanny is again the recuperation of the loss: the lost part destroys reality instead of completing it."
76-77: Frankenstein and gaze.
78: link between uncanny and ideology
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