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(All parts in English)

Vainly… I repeat,

Vainly your image reaches to meet me
And does not enter where I am, who only shows it.
You, turning toward me, would only find
On the wall of my gaze your dreamed shadow.

I am that unfortunate being comparable to mirrors,
Which can reflect but cannot see.
Like them, my eye is empty and like them inhabited
By the absence of you, which makes it blind.

You may remember that in one of my last remarks, I began with these verses from Le Fou d’Elsa by ARAGON, titled “Contre-chant”. At that time, I did not know that I would give so much development to what concerns the gaze.
No doubt, I was influenced by the mode through which I was led to present to you the function, the concept,
in FREUD, of “repetition.”

Let us not deny that it is at this point in the development—this “digression,” let’s say—focused particularly on the scopic function, that it is situated within the explanation of repetition, undoubtedly sustained, encouraged, and induced by what seemed necessary to me to present to you in the work that has just been published by MERLEAU-PONTY: The Visible and the Invisible.

Moreover, it seems to me that if there is a “meeting” here, it is a fortunate one [εὐτυχία (eutuchia)], fundamental, and destined to punctuate—just as I will attempt to demonstrate further today—how, within the perspective of the unconscious, we can situate consciousness.

You know that some veil, shadow, or even, to use a term we will employ, certain reserves—in the sense one speaks of “reserves” in a fabric exposed to dyeing—mark this fact of consciousness in FREUD’s own discourse.

Let us pick up where we left off last time.

I must say that what I attempted to show you regarding what I have called the “schism between vision and the gaze” did not entirely satisfy me. This is what I hope, with some chance, to present to you today and to help you grasp in its proper function.

Yet, before I delve into it—and precisely regarding the fundamental function of the meeting—I must clarify a point that does not pertain to what we will develop today concerning the visual function. It is something I learned was misunderstood last time by those who hear me: namely, I do not know what perplexity remained in their ears concerning the use of a simple word I employed while commenting on it: I spoke of the “tychic.”

To some, it resonated only as a sneeze. Yet, I had clarified that it was the adjective of τύχη [tychē]—just as “psychic” is the adjective corresponding to ψυχή [psychē]—and it was not without intention that I used this analogy at the heart of the experience of repetition, at the heart of every conception of psychic development as analysis has illuminated it.

The fact of the “tychic,” I told you, is central, and it is with respect

• to this εὐτυχία [eutuchia: fortunate meeting] or δυστυχία [dustuchia: unfortunate meeting],
• this “fortunate meeting” or this “unfortunate meeting,”

…that my discourse today will also be structured.

“I saw myself seeing myself,” says La Jeune Parque at one point. Assuredly, this statement has its meaning, both full and complex, when it concerns the theme developed in La Jeune Parque, namely that of femininity. We have not reached that point. We are dealing with the philosopher who grasps something that can be said to be one of the essential correlates of consciousness in its relationship to representation, and which is designated as: “I see myself seeing myself.” What kind of evidence might be attached to this formula?

How is it that it remains, ultimately, correlative to this fundamental, inaugural, and original mode, to which we have referred in the Cartesian cogito, by which the subject grasps itself as thought, at the very point—ultimate—where this thought isolates itself in a kind of doubt, called “methodical doubt,” that limits anything that could support it in the representation it believes it must confine to its own grasping, in doubt.

How is it that this “I see myself seeing myself” remains, in a way, the envelope, the background, something stuck to this extreme point, upon which—perhaps more than one thinks—its certainty depends? It is not enough to say that this would be the ultimate point of reference through which the subject, despite its attachment to a body, does not cling to a formula like: “I warm myself by warming myself.”
Here, no doubt, it is a reference to the body: as a body, I am seized by this sensation of warmth, which diffuses from some point within me and localizes me as a body.

In “I see myself seeing myself,” it is not evident that I am, in an analogous way, seized by vision. Moreover, phenomenologists have articulated with precision and in the most disconcerting way that it is quite clear that I see outside, “outside of…”—that perception is not within me, that it is upon the objects it apprehends.

I grasp the world in a perception that nevertheless seems to derive from that immanence present in “I see myself seeing myself.” The privilege of the subject thus seems to establish itself in this bipolar relationship—so to speak—following which it seems that, from that point on, my representations belong to me.

And it is through this that the world—in this reflection—is struck by a presumption of idealization, the suspicion of delivering to me only my representations, idealizing any theory, whose practical seriousness… carries little weight, but which places the philosopher, both with respect to himself and to those who listen to him, in a position of embarrassment: how to deny that nothing in the world appears to me except through my representations?

And you know, this is the irreducible, fundamental approach of Bishop BERKELEY, about whom much could be said regarding his subjective position, particularly concerning what may have escaped you in passing, namely this “belonging” of my representations, evoking the world of property. At its limit, the process of this meditation reaches the point you know it has been taken by the progress of this reflective thought: to reduce this subject, grasped in Cartesian meditation, to a power of negation.

The mode of my presence in the world is this subject, which, by force of reducing itself to this sole certainty of being a subject, becomes active negation—a progression of philosophical meditation that effectively shifts toward transformative historical action and, around this point, organizes the active, configured modes of self-consciousness through its metamorphoses in history.

At the limit, finally, this meditation on Being, which culminates, for example, in HEIDEGGER’s thought, and as it is taken up by SARTRE in Being and Nothingness, comes to restore to Being itself—or at least to pose the question:
how it is to Being that this presence in the world—and among beings—of this power of negation can be related?

This is precisely the point where Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY leads us in his reflection centered on The Visible and the Invisible.
If you refer to his text, you will see that it is at this point that he stops—or more precisely, that he chooses to step back—in order to propose a return to the sources of intuition concerning The Visible and the Invisible:

• to return to what is prior to any reflection, whether it is thetic or non-thetic,
• to attempt to identify, in this earlier phase, the point of emergence of vision itself,
• to try to restore—for, as he tells us, it cannot be anything other than a reconstruction or a restoration, not a path retraced in reverse, which is strictly speaking impossible—to return to that point where it is not, to use his terminology, from the body but from something he calls “the flesh of the world” that this original point of vision may have emerged, from something that appears, to reveal therein this original dimension, so intrinsically linked for us to what, through the subsequent course of philosophical reflection, in the pursuit of ἐπιστήμη [epistēmē] and exact knowledge, always appears so rooted in this field of vision.

In this unfinished work, something seems to emerge like the search for this point of manifestation, of an unnamed substance, where I myself, the seer, extract myself from the meshes—or rays, if you prefer—of a shimmering of which I am initially a part. It is in the direction of this secret, from which I will emerge as “eye,” taking on in a way the emergence, the origin, of what I might call the function of seeing:

• something like a wild scent emanates from it, which, as punctuated in the text by that very word, hints at something like “the hunt of Artemis” on the horizon,
• something whose touch seems associated with the moment of tragic failure when we lost the one who speaks.

Is this truly the path he wanted to take? The traces that remain concerning the forthcoming part of his meditation allow us, however, to doubt it. Among these traces, the markers that are particularly assigned to the unconscious—to the specifically psychoanalytic unconscious—give us a glimpse that it may have been in the direction of a properly articulated investigation, centered on this new, original dimensional fact of meditation on the subject, as analysis allows us to trace it, that he might have directed himself.

For my part, I cannot help but be struck by certain of his notes, which appear to me less enigmatic than they might seem to other readers, aligning quite exactly with certain schemas—especially one among them—that I might be led to elaborate on here: notes concerning what he calls the turning inside-out, like a glove, insofar as it seems to appear—I know, in such an imagined reversal, like how the skin envelops the fur in a winter glove—that consciousness, in its illusion of “seeing itself seeing,” finds its foundation in something relating to the inverted structure of the gaze.

But what is the gaze? This is what I will attempt to explore today, beginning from this primary, decisive fact, where something marks in this field—pushed ever further—the reduction of the subject to that point of negation which signals the break, something where analysis alerts us that, founded or unfounded, this direction requires us to introduce it with a reference other than the one analysis employs to reduce the privileges of consciousness, fixing limits to it, considering consciousness as irreparably bounded in relation to this expectation: the subject as thought, or instituting it—this consciousness—not only as a principle of idealization but also of misrecognition, and, as it has been said, in a term whose value is once again drawn from the visual domain, instituting it properly as a “scotoma.”

You know that this term has been introduced into the field of analytical vocabulary, particularly at the level of the French school.
Is this mere metaphor? Once again, we encounter the ambiguity surrounding everything that for us is inscribed in the register of the scopic drive.

Here, consciousness, for us now, counts only by its relation to what—I emphasize this as being excessively propaedeutic—we must attempt to articulate at its best within the fiction of the incomplete text, through which the subject must be re-centered—as speaking, precisely—within the gaps of that in which it first presents itself as speaking.

What does this mean here? That we are only stating the relationship of the preconscious to the unconscious. But, as FREUD emphasized, the specific fiction, the dynamic attached to consciousness as such, to the attention the subject has brought to its own text, is something that remains, in a way, outside of articulation and, strictly speaking, yet to be articulated.

It is here that I advance the claim that this relationship of interest the subject takes in their own schism is linked to the nature by which this schism is determined—determined, as in all fantasy, as I have given you its general formula, by the dependence of the subject’s schism on a privileged object that emerges from some primal separation, some form of self-mutilation—determined by the very approach to the real.

In this relationship, which is the scopic relationship, this object—on which the fantasy depends, to which the subject is attached in an essential vacillation—this object is called the gaze. Its privilege, and also the reason why the subject for so long has misrecognized their dependence on it, lies in the structure, in the very nature, I might say, of the gaze.

Let us immediately sketch what we mean here. As soon as the gaze is something the subject tries to accommodate themselves to, it becomes this punctiform object, this vanishing point of being, with which the subject confuses their own failure.

Of all the objects through which the subject can recognize their dependence in the register of desire, the gaze is specified as elusive, and it is for this reason that it is more misrecognized than any other object. It is also perhaps for this reason that the subject so easily symbolizes themselves in their own vanishing and punctiform trait, in that something in which they do not recognize the gaze, namely in this illusion of the consciousness of “seeing oneself seeing.”

The question is therefore: if the gaze is the reverse side of consciousness, how are we to try—if I may use the expression—to “imagine” the gaze? The expression is not improper, for after all, the gaze is something to which we can give substance.

As you know, SARTRE, in one of the most brilliant passages of Being and Nothingness, brings it into function within the dimension of the existence of the Other. It is a truly fascinating endeavor, as it is felicitous. I mean that it gives us the sense that, somewhere, at an absolutely privileged point, it is genuinely realized.

You know that it is as a gaze that the Other presents themselves, in a field that SARTRE first defined as that of objectivity. To the extent that it leaves the object and the negating consciousness tied in a fundamental uncertainty in a confrontation, the Other would remain suspended under the same conditions.

The Other—I hope I said—would remain suspended under the same partially unrealizing conditions of objectivity if it were not for the gaze. The gaze, as conceived by SARTRE, is the gaze by which I am surprised—surprised in that:

• it changes all the perspectives of my world,
• it alters its lines of force,
• it organizes the world from the point of nothingness where I am, into a sort of reticulated network of relations among organisms.

This locus of the relationship between me, as a negating subject, and what surrounds me—this gaze, in its meaning, would have such a privilege that it could even “scotomize” me—it is I who introduce the word here—the eye of the one who looks at me as an object. As SARTRE writes, as I am under the gaze, I would no longer see the eye that looks at me, and if I do see the eye, it is then the gaze that disappears.

Is this a phenomenological analysis that can be considered truly accurate? It is not true that when I am under the gaze, when I seek a gaze, when I obtain it, I take no interest in it, nor see it as a gaze. This sphere, which can extend quite far—and the question is precisely how far it extends—this sphere of the mask that I call the gaze has been captured eminently by painters, who have seen the gaze as such, within the mask, and I need only evoke GOYA, for instance, to make you feel it.

The gaze is seen—this gaze of which SARTRE speaks, this gaze that surprises me and reduces me to a certain shame, for that is the feeling he describes as the most accentuated. The reason for this encounter with the gaze is curiously found in SARTRE’s text, not so much in a gaze seen, but in a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.

For if you refer to his text, you will see that far from speaking of the entry of this gaze as something concerning what we call a “gaze,” he refers instead to the sound of leaves suddenly heard while I am hunting, or to a step emerging in the corridor—and at what moment?—the moment when he himself is engaged in the act of looking, and not just in any way: through a keyhole. It is a gaze that surprises him in the function of the imaginary voyeur he sustains, that unsettles him, capsizes him, and reduces him to that feeling of shame. The gaze in question is indeed the presence of the Other as such, and no doubt a relation to something for which it is not fundamentally erroneous to call it a “gaze.”

But is it truly accurate to say that, originally, it is in this relationship from subject to subject, in the function of the Other’s existence as looking at me, that we grasp what is original about the gaze? Perhaps there would be a way to locate within the very field of vision to which it so evidently belongs, this gaze as an object—an object in the function in question, namely: in this relationship to the unconscious insofar as it allows us—for the first time in history—to situate the relation of desire.

And even in SARTRE’s own example, we see that the gaze here intervenes and is effective only insofar as the subject feels surprised by it, not so much as a subject—as this negating, punctiform element that correlates to the world of objects or ideas—but as SARTRE incarnates himself before us, representing himself as surprised in a function of desire.

And it is not because this desire is established in the very domain in question, the one I have called that of seeing, that we can bypass this dimension, for it emerges there, relating it in a way that, in relation to what precedes, introduces a new dimension.

The privilege of the gaze in the function of desire, in the very mechanism of vision, flows within us, so to speak, along the very veins through which this domain of vision, as such, integrates into what concerns desire. It is no coincidence that it is at the same time as Cartesian meditation inaugurates, in its purity, the function of the subject, that this dimension of optics develops to its highest point, which I will here distinguish by calling it “geometrical.”

I will immediately focus on an object and, so that my demonstration does not appear to lose itself in abstraction, illustrate with one object among many—which is exemplary in what so curiously attached so much reflection and construction to that era. For those who wish to pursue further what I am attempting to make you sense today, I refer you to the book by BALTRUSAÏTIS on Anamorphoses.

In my seminar, I have extensively used certain properties of this function of anamorphosis, precisely insofar as it exemplifies a structure. For those who were not present when I discussed it and who do not know, on the other hand, what anamorphosis is, I showed in my seminar a very, very fine example that I took care to bring from outside. A simple anamorphosis, not cylindrical, consists of the following:

• Imagine a portrait that would be here on this flat sheet, and by chance, you see that blackboard there in an oblique position.
• Suppose that, using a series of strings or ideal lines, I project onto this oblique surface each point of the image drawn here.

I think you can easily imagine what will result on a board if it is oblique: you will obtain this figure extraordinarily enlarged and distorted along the lines of what might be called a perspective. This assumes that once this work is done, and I remove what served for the construction—namely the image placed in my visual field—the impression I will gain by placing myself and remaining in this position relative to the oblique surface in front of me will be essentially the same; that is, at the very least, I will recognize the general features of the image, or at best, I will have an identical impression of it.

I will now circulate something dating back about a hundred years earlier, to 1533, namely the image I think you all recognize: The Ambassadors painted by Hans HOLBEIN. Those who know it will recall it through this. Those who do not know it will have to examine it carefully for the purpose I hope to make of it in what follows.

The very method by which I have just been led to present to you the construction of anamorphosis introduces you to considering something concerning the field of vision that I will express as follows: there is a mode in which vision is ordered within what can generally be called the function of images, this function being defined in relation to a point-to-point correspondence of two units in space. Whether an image is a virtual image or a real image, regardless of the optical intermediaries used to establish their relationship, this point-to-point correspondence is essential.

What belongs to this order within the field of vision is thus reducible to this simplest schema, the one materialized in the mode under which I just explained how anamorphosis could be established, namely the relationship of an image, insofar as it is linked to a surface, to a certain point that we might call, for clarity, a “geometrical point.” And whatever is determined in this methodical way—where the straight line plays its role due to being the path of light—whatever is established in a trace thus constituted can be called an “image.”

It is clear that at the point where artistic and scientific reflection meets, art and science intertwine: Leonardo da VINCI is both a scientist through his dioptric constructions and an artist at the same time. Likewise, VITRUVIUS’s treatise De Architectura is not far off. It is in VIGNOLA (Le Due Regole della Prospettiva) and ALBERTI (De Pictura) that we find the progressive questioning of the geometrical laws of perspective, and around the research into perspective, a privileged interest arises concerning the domain of vision, which we cannot fail to see as related to the questioning—or, I would even say, the institution—of the Cartesian subject, which itself is a kind of geometrical point.

Here, the subject is instituted as the point of perspective from which the order of vision is organized, such that, at that time, the painting—this highly significant function to which we shall return—is established in an entirely new way in the history of painting, in this rigorous perspective insofar as it is geometrical. This is precisely what, at this crucial point in the constitution of the subject and its relationship to vision, we are dealing with.

Now, I urge you to refer to DIDEROT’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, where you will find something developed in a manifest way that will make you realize how completely this leaves out what vision is. For this space of vision—even when it includes these imaginary parts in virtual space, like the mirror that, as you know, I have emphasized greatly—is perfectly reconstructible, imaginable by a blind person.

What is at stake is the mapping of space, not vision. The blind person can conceive that, under certain conditions, this field of space they know and know as real could be perceived from a distance and simultaneously. This is far more a temporal function, an instantaneousness in an exploration where, as works on optics show—see DESCARTES’s Dioptrique, for instance—the action of the eyes is represented as the combined action of two sticks.

[Descartes: Dioptrique, Fig. 21]

This geometrical dimension of vision is something that, at the very least, we must say does not exhaust—and far from it—what the field of vision, as such, proposes to us as an original subjectivating relationship. Likewise, we must understand this usage, inverted as you see it, in anamorphosis, in the establishment of perspective. For what is its original apparatus?

It was DÜRER himself [Albrecht Dürer: Underweysung der Messung] who invented it. The “Dürer’s grid” is something akin to what I was just describing, placing between myself and this painting a certain image—or more precisely, a mesh, a grid through which points and straight lines pass, which are not necessarily rays of light but also threads that link each point I need to see in the surrounding structure of the world to a point where the mesh, the grid, is crossed by that line. This grid is established to create a correct perspective image.

Now, let us reverse its use. Imagine I take pleasure in something that is not at all the restitution of the world at the far end, but rather—for another surface—the deformation of what I myself would have obtained as an image on that field surface. I linger, as though playing a delightful game, with this method that brings forth something stretched out, something deformed in a particular way. And I assure you that this practice had its place in its time.

The book by BALTRUSAÏTIS will tell you about the furiously passionate debates that arose from these practices, which culminated in significant works. For example, the Couvent des Minimes—now destroyed but once located near Rue des Tournelles—featured on one of its very long gallery walls a painting of Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos. The painting was appropriately scaled to a gallery of comparable length. To fully appreciate its effect, one had to view it through a small hole so that its distorting value could be entirely revealed. This feature—though not in this particular fresco but in others—could lend itself to all sorts of paranoiac ambiguities. From ARCIMBOLDO to Salvador DALI, this method has found varied uses.

Does it not strike you as peculiar, even startling, that in this phenomenon, I might even see the complementary fascination of what escaped this type of research on perspective? How is it that no one has ever thought of evoking in this context something akin to the effect… of an erection? Imagine a tattoo drawn on the appropriate organ in its resting state, which then, in another state, takes its developed form, if I may put it that way.

Do we not here have something that appears as immanent to this specified phase—extracted […]—in the formation of the gaze, as this geometrical function which, I stress, has nothing to do, properly speaking, with vision? Vision does not at all presuppose this dimension, which we will try to articulate in its proper form in our next session. How can we not see, in this game manifested here at the level of this partial dimension, something that takes on symbolic value for us as representative of the function of lack—the emergence of the phallic phantom?

Now, in this painting of The Ambassadors, which I hope has circulated enough to pass through every hand, what do you see? What is this strange object, suspended, oblique, in the foreground, before these two figures whose value as a gaze, I think, has been apparent to all of you? These two figures are rigidly posed in their ceremonial ornaments, surrounded by a series of objects—none other than the very objects that, in the painting of the period, symbolize vanitas.

At the same time, CORNELIUS AGRIPPA writes De Vanitate Scientiarum. It concerns both the sciences and the arts, and these objects all symbolize the sciences and arts as grouped at the time within the trivium and quadrivium. What is this flying, inclined object before this display of the domain of appearance in its most fascinating forms? You cannot know. You turn away to escape the fascination of the painting. You begin to leave the room, where the painting has likely held you captive for a long time. And it is only then, turning back as you depart, as described by the author of Anamorphoses, that you perceive in this form—what?—a skull.

Yet this is not how it first presents itself. The figure that the author compares to a cuttlefish bone reminds me of the two-pound loaf of bread that DALI, in earlier times, liked to place on the head of a poor, grimy, unconscious old woman specifically chosen for the effect. Or those soft watches of his—equally phallic in significance—which echo the flying object you see in the foreground of this painting.

All this shows us that at the very heart of these inquiries into geometrical function, at the heart of this historical moment when the subject takes shape, HOLBEIN visibly reveals something here that is none other than the sight of the subject itself in the foreground of the painting, sufficiently indicated by its final form as perceived through anamorphic perspective: the subject as nullified. But nullified in a form that is, properly speaking, the incarnation in the image of the –ϕ of castration, which for us centers and necessitates centering everything concerning the organization of desires within the frameworks of the fundamental drives.

How can we express this more profoundly, and see that we must go even further to investigate the function of vision and see emerging from it not this phallic symbol nor this anamorphic phantom, but the gaze itself, in its pulsating function—at once dazzling and exposed, as it is in this painting you have before you, which is nothing other than what every painting is: a trap for the gaze?

This gaze—in any painting whatsoever—is precisely what will disappear as you search for it in every point of the image.

This is what I will attempt to articulate more clearly next time.