The Split of the Eye and the Gaze

Dossia Avdelidi

In Seminar XI, Lacan links the gaze with the Other and desire, and argues that at the scopic level we are not at the level of demand but at that of the desire of the Other. He states: “If one does not stress the dialectic of desire, one does not understand why the gaze of others should disorganise the field of perception. It is because the subject in question is not that of the reflexive consciousness, but that of desire.”[1] When we speak of the gaze as object little a, this gaze is not the gaze of the subject. It is fundamentally the gaze of the Other.   

Lacan differentiates the gaze from vision. This is what he calls the split of the eye and the gaze. The gaze cannot be reduced to the simple fact of vision. “In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it––that is what we call the gaze,”[2] he says. The gaze escapes the vision that imagines itself to be conscious. Lacan even says that the gaze is the other side of consciousness. The gaze is elusive; it is more unknown than any other object. “Generally speaking, the relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as object a, that is to say, at the level of the lack (-φ).”[3] Vision, as he puts it, “is ordered according to a mode that may generally be called the function of images.”[4]

The gaze is what makes the subject be looked at. Miller retains the term “vision” for a certain intersubjective reciprocity and specialises the term “gaze” to qualify this object that emerges in the field of the Other. In a 1994 text, he states: “In the very measure that the specular relation of the ‘I see myself seeing myself’ supports the imaginary identifications––and, basically, the mirror stands to materialise the image––it conceals the distinction to be made between the vision and the look [gaze]. Between the vision as function of the organ of sight, and the gaze, its immanent object, where the subject’s desire is inscribed, which is not an organ––or a function of any biology.”[5]

The gaze is not the subject’s perceptive response to the perceived.  It includes the subject as a being that is being looked at. So “the seer is not a pure subject of vision, his definition is not exhausted in the property of seeing, but he is himself immersed in the visible of his body,”[6] says Miller. We are beings looked at in the spectacle of the world, which appears as omnivoyeur. Lacan places the gaze outside the scopic field. The subject is looked at, in other words, it is a tableau. “In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way––on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them.”[7]

References

[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1977, p. 89.

[2] Ibid., p. 73.

[3] Ibid., p. 104.

[4] Ibid., p. 86.

[5] Miller, J.-A., “Jacques Lacan and the Voice,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 6, 2001, p. 95.

[6] Miller J.-A., « D'un regard, l'étrangeté », La cause du désir, 102, 2019, p. 46.

[7] Lacan, J., Seminar XI, op.cit., p. 109.