What We're Reading - English Department - College of Arts and Science

(Re)-Turn: A Journal of
Lacanian Studies
(Volume 3 & 4, Spring 2008)
by Ellie Ragland and
Evelyn Moore, eds.

Review by Svitlana Matviyenko
Svitlana Matviyenko is a PhD
candidate studying visual and
media theory and Lacanian
psychoanalysis (with Prof. Ellie
Ragland). Her research focuses
on photography, early cinema,
experimental film, and
cyberculture.

What We're Reading

(Re)-Turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies (Volume 3 & 4, Spring 2008) co-edited by Ellie Ragland (University of Missouri-Columbia) and Evelyn Moore (Kenyon College) is one of the most respected journals in the field of Lacanian studies. Published by the University of Missouri, the journal offers a significant contribution to psychoanalytic theory and to the human sciences in general. This issue of (Re)-Turn is focused on the gaze, one of the most widely adopted Lacanian concepts throughout the humanities—in visual studies, film studies, art criticism, media studies, social and literary studies, to name only a few. As the editors point out, “[t]he Lacanian gaze is not merely a way of rethinking vision, but is a new mapping of perception itself” (4).

Although Jacques Lacan mentions the gaze as early as the mid 1950s in response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of the look, he does not develop his own theory until 1964, when the distinction between the two concepts becomes obvious. In contrast to Sartre’s theory, the Lacanian gaze is not the act of looking, but the object of the act of looking. Illustrated by Slavoj Zizek, the gaze is that somethin g watching from the tightly curtained window as Marion Crane approaches the house on the hill in Hitchcock’s Psycho (see Zizek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture).

This important aspect of the Lacanian gaze is addressed by (MU English department alumnus) Clifford T. Manlove in his article “On the ‘Split’ between the Eye and the Gaze in Literature” from Volume 3 of (Re)-Turn. Manlove explains that the Lacanian theory of the gaze undermines Cartesian theories of optics that have always dominated modern theories of perception, in which “visual perception is ideal” (71). To Lacan, seeing is not believing. Or better, seeing is not-believing, precisely because whenever the subject looks at the object, s/he comes to realize that the object has always already been looking at the subject. Therefore, the gaze is a gazing back spot, without an exact location. “You can never look at me from the place at which I see you,” Lacan explains in Seminar 11. In other words, there is a split between the eye and the gaze. They never meet, and it is due to the impossibility of this encounter that the following experiences are so common, as Lacan explains: “the feeling one is being watched, shame and averting one’s eyes, having eyes in the back of your head, paranoia and the feeling that everyone is out to get you, walking dreams, the ‘evil eye,’ an all-knowing all-seeing god” (81).

A number of the articles in this issue, such as Evelyn Moor’s “The Deadly Gaze: Penthesilea and Achilles in Love,” Ellie Ragland’s “The Topological Dimension of Lacanian Optics” and the aforementioned article by Manlove, approach and criticize Laura Mulvey’s influential concept of the gaze developed in her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Their criticism can be boiled down to the following points. First, Mulvey narrows the concept of the gaze to a visual field only. Second, although her reading is presented as a utilization of Lacanian theory, Mulvey does not distinguish between the gaze and the act of looking, which makes her theory of the gaze more Sartrean than Lacanian. Third, despite the Lacanian understanding of the gaze as being always and already everywhere, Mulvey suggests that the gaze is constructed . And finally, Mulvey’s gaze is gendered, which, of course, radically distinguishes her concept of the gaze of the other from Lacanian “all-knowing all-seeing” and the omnipresent gaze of the Other.

The journal also reprints a chapter from Gérard Wajcman’s Painting. This work, demonstrating the process of visual mapping, falls into several smaller chapters, each of them emphasizing the following stages and elements of the process: “To Show,” “To Situate,” “To Represent,” “The Foundation,” “The Elementary,” “Screen,” “Surface.” “Space as such cannot be thought outside of thought.” Wajcman explains Lacan’s move to topology in the following terms: “Thought does not introduce a measure of space, supposedly conceived of as separated—it is constitutive of space. Also, says Lacan, thought cannot explore space since it is that which builds it” (125).

These two volumes under one cover – “The Gaze: Fantasy and the Desire of the Other” (a title that comes from Jacques Alain Miller’s opening article) and “The Topology of the Gaze” – should serve to break several stereotypes about Lacanian psychoanalysis and the concept of the gaze in particular. They reiterate the point that Lacan’s theory is not only focused on language, as many think; on the other hand, a Lacanian concept such as the gaze reaches far beyond the field of vision to which it is often mistakenly limited. In the theorist’s later works, this concept opens up Lacanian theory to topology. By means of schemes and spatial figures, topology demonstrates another meaning system beyond the grammatical that does, however, operate within a regular language. This discovery was made in the clinic, where Lacanian theory is grounded, and to which, after journeying through cultural studies, it (re)-turns.