Only Appear When Looked For

gaze

trivia

staring

is a term referring to the fact that the knower is constructed alongside the object of knowledge.

This is a term that Foucault introduces in his 1963 book The Birth of the Clinic. The French word 'le regard' poses difficulties for translation into English as the translator Alan Sheridan notes. It can mean glance, gaze, look which do not have the abstract connotations that the word has in French. Foucault uses the word to refer to the fact that it is not just the object of knowledge which is constructed but also the knower. Clinical medicine at the end of the eighteenth century set much store on visibility on looking and seeing and on visible symptoms.

is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the other.

The gaze sees itself to be precise, the gaze of which Sartre speaks, the gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame, since this is the feeling he regards as the most dominant. The gaze I encounter you can find this in Sartre's own writing is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other. (Lacan 'the gaze as object petit a' : 522)

is not about sight. It is rarely concerned with the organ of sight. It concerns the rustle of leaves, footsteps in the corridor.

If you turn to Sartre's own text, you will see that, far from speaking of the emergence of this gaze as of something that concerns the organ of sight, he refers to the sound of rustling leaves, suddenly heard while out hunting, to a footstep heard in a corridor. And when are these sounds heard' At the moment when he has presented himself in the action of looking through a keyhole. (Lacan 'the gaze as object petit a' : 522)

is not necessarily concerned with the organ of sight, by being looked at by two eye-balls. It is given just as well in the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.

Lacan is especially taken with Sartre's view that the gaze does not necessarily concern the organ of sight:' (sartre writes) 'Of course what most often manifests a look is the convergence of two ocular globes in my direction. But the look will be given just as well on occasion when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.[5](online lacan dictionary)

is, on the side of the object whereas the eye that looks is that of the subject. The gaze is that object of the act of looking. The gaze is thus always the gaze of the other.

And whereas Sartre had conceived of an essential reciprocity between seeing the Other and being-seen-by-him, Lacan now conceives of an antinomic relation between the gaze and the eye: the eye which looks is that of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object, and there is no coincidence between the two, since 'You never look at me from the place at which I see you.'[7] . . . . 'Whereas Sartre had conflated the gaze with the act of looking, Lacan now separates the two... the gaze becomes the object of the act of looking, or, to be more precise, the object of the scopic drive. The gaze is therefore, in Lacan's account, no longer on the side of the subject... it is the gaze of the Other. (online lacan dictionary)

is the way objects look at us. This is why it makes sense to say, for example, that a teddy bear on a shelf cannot be said to 'see' me. This statement has any sense at all only because it is looking at me, all the same.

To begin with, if what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated and I am not speaking metaphorically. (Lacan 'the gaze as object petit a' : 529)

is the way an objects looks at a subject. From the moment it appears the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes the object that strives to bring itself into alignment with it, fails, and then puts the blame on himself rather than on the object.

Let us schematize at once what we mean. From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure. Furthermore, of all the objects in which the subject may recognize his dependence in the register of desire, the gaze is specified as unapprehensible. (Lacan 'the gaze as object petit a' : 522)

is not a look but a solicitation of a look. It is a lure, such that when in love, I solicit a look and feel unsatisfied because 'you never look at me from the place from which I see you'.

From the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure. When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that You never look at me from the place from which I see you. (Lacan 'gaze as object petite a' : 533)

gaze, n.Trivia

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