The Lacanian Gaze... introducing "Platonic Gyges"

"I am not simply... located at the geometrical point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am in the picture." 

- Lacan, "Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis" (1964-1964) 

“That the queen could see Gyges in the bedroom indicates that she possessed not only a power to make things invisible but also a corresponding power (as invisible spy) to make visible to herself things that were invisible to other people. Ptolemaeus Chennus writes that the eyes of "the wife of Candaules". . . had double pupils, and she was extremely sharp sighted, being the possessor of the dragon-stone. This is how she came to see Gyges as he passed through the door.” The dragon-stone has an opposite effect from the magic ring. In one case the talisman makes people invisible; in the other case, it makes people visible: taken together, their power makes things visible or invisible. This is the power of Platonic Gyges. It is also the power of the archetypal tyrant.”

---

Lacan’s sardine-tin story throws light on the issue of the “all-seen” subject, now splitting in search of itself, now diving, now reduced to zero.

In this little anecdote Lacan happens to be in search of something different, “in the country, or at the sea.” So much so that from morning till night he finds himself sailing…on a tiny boat, in the midst of fishermen, parting from the local port. Brittany was not really industrialized at that point—there were no trawlers—and the fishermen went to sea in their own frail crafts, at great risk to themselves. “It was this risk, this danger that I loved to share.”

One day, while waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, Petit-Jean pointed out to Lacan something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a sardine can. Floating there in the sun, it was “a witness to the canning industry.” Petit-Jean said, “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”

We may guess that Lacan was already talking to these men about things they had never heard of before, but they seemed to understand more than what he expected. In saying this Petit-Jean was laughing. Not Lacan. Why? Because he understood that the can was seeing him, “…at the level of the point of light at which everything that looks at you is situated.”

What does Lacan mean by this point of light, and why would the event disturb him? The pattern of the fractured word pre-exists the being, already breaking up between itself and its semblance, between itself and the photograph it shows to the other. Thus the point of light embodying the gaze: “…I enter light and it’s from the gaze that…I am photo-graphed.”

In this picture there is Lacan, himself a rare object in the landscape—a sardine tin in the sea. Caught in metaphor, if the tin represents a devastating eruption of industry in the realm of nature, Lacan’s presence among those fellows earning their livings with great difficulty, “looked like nothing on earth.”

From the perspective of the subject, how Lacan looked at/from the can was not affected by the fishermen’s thoughts or feelings. His perception, in the Other, is but his own perception of himself. “In the depths of my eye the picture is painted, but the subject is not in the picture…if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen…the stain, the spot.”

The notion of the stain comes back later in Encore, “…there where it talks, it jouis, but it knows nothing.” Two categories of thought: “la pensé,…it thinks you, le pensé,…it thinks of you.” 2

It, a stain, thinks you. If the work of art, like the signifier equated to an angel, is empty—in the sense that you are not supposed to eat Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, or clean the house with his Brillo pads—if the work of art thinks you, it is because it may hold you in its fold, for the stain/you to joui, there where it talks, but wants to know nothing.

From Louis Aragon, from Contre-chant, in the Fou d’Elsa:

A wretch, I am like mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited
By your absence which makes them blind.

---

The trauma of the encounter with the Gaze is, in a sense, the trauma with the absence of any safe distance from the world. Once one recognizes the Gaze you shouldn't be able to... the gamble is, one can no longer retreat into oneself.



So this gaze in Lacan's theorization of the Gaze in Seminars 11 and 13, I think, is the is really the high point of his philosophical trajectory. So, it's a point at which he forces us to confront that we're never removed from what we think is foreign. So the thing that we think is alien to us, were involved in that. And I think that's really an important philosophical idea on Lacan's part. And with the concept of the Gaze, I think he pushes his theory, I used this word before and I think it's the really important, one to its most dialectical point. So the point at which subjectivity is manifested in the world of objects. He sees, in other words, how the subject is always unconsciously "other" to itself.