Another Kick at La/can: "I Am a Picture"

"Much more effective as a plague than Freud ever was, Lacan is everywhere and nowhere, like a contagion."

—Juliet Flower MacCannell, 1986

I say "kick" because writing about Lacan ought to allow one to get one's kicks, to kick ideas about, to kick against the pricks. Those who use Lacan as a theoretical walking-stick do so after their own fashion. And fashion is what Lacan amounts to, if by fashion we mean that which both shapes and suits the time. Lacan fits our moment of fin de siècle uncertainty because of his nicely intricate and infinitely regressive style. He prompts us to think of language as endlessly inventive, crossing borders, squiggling out of our control. For example, French, as far as I know, does not contain the word "can," but if it did I suspect the word would be masculine, not feminine as in la/can. Nicely, we might say "Lacan" contains its opposite, its other; the male has its female self and vice versa. "In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as a male or female being" (Four Concepts 204). On the other hand, French does contain the feminine word "canne," which among other things means a cane, a reed, or a walking-stick. Jacques Lacan as a cane, something to lean on while we interpret a work or works of literature, this is my subject. Lacan's work is notoriously intractable and wonderfully wide in its potential applications. Not being able either to cover a lot of Lacanian ground or to claim complete mastery of his theories, I wish to focus here on the Lacanian gaze. The gaze is an aspect of Lacan's conception of the "Other," and my real concern is with the self as "Other" because this idea allows us entrance to notions of foreignness and difference that might serve us well in this day of multicultural experience.

First, a word about the "Other." This word appears in both lower-case and upper-case letters in Lacan's work. With an upper-case "O," the "Other" refers to several things, as Madan Sarup notes: sometimes to the unconscious, sometimes "to one term in the dialectical couple Subject-Other," and sometimes to "'otherness' in the sense of heterogeneity" (185). Whatever its several meanings might be, it has something to do with that which governs the human within interpersonal situations; it is akin to the Freudian superego, although it has its existence beyond (as well as within) the unconscious of the individual. The "Other" is a concept (metaphor) rather than a specific entity. With a lower-case "o," "otherness" denotes the person or persons to whom we speak or otherwise address ourselves in our everyday dealings. This "other" results from Lacan's mirror stage, when we first see ourselves from the outside, as it were. The "other" is an imaginary construct, imaginary because what we see as the "other" is a reflection of our own desires.

In his essay "The Subject and the Other: Alienation," Lacan writes: "The Other is the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject—it is the field of that living being in which the subject has to appear" (Four Concepts 203). In other words, the subject is itself only partially seen or known, just as the subject only partially sees or knows. The subject appears in a field of vision; I am a picture. Just as I see the world, so the world sees me. Seeing is believing, but we never believe with perfect certainty. Something always remains just outside the field of vision, and this something is what we desire to see. In order to satisfy this desire, we see that which represents what we want to see. We see a world of images, but these images stand in for that which remains unseen, for that which is real (in the Lacanian sense of that which transcends reality). This is the gaze. The gaze, according to Antonio Quintet's reading of Lacan, is a drive or symptom...