The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek

The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek
By Henry Krips

Culture Unbound, Volume
2, 2010: 91–102.


Cannot upload the article here but have extracted relevant quotes and my thoughts on them below.



“That which is gaze is always a play of light and opacity. It is always that gleam of light…which prevents me, at each point, from being a screen”. The gaze, Lacan then adds, “is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of...the lack that constitutes castration anxiety…It surprises [the viewer]…disturbs him and reduces him to a feeling of shame” (Lacan 1981: 96, 72–73, 84).
The camera is a form of the gaze, 


"...the subject is brought to recognize that there is a hole, a lack, in his visual field – a something that, because it is present but cannot be seen, functions as a point of failure of the visual field... a point of indeterminacy in the visual field, where the subject fails to see."
The camera is like a vortex into which sound, light and time get sucked, and we don't know how it frames us, only that it frames us... putting us in a place of forced submission.



"In short, resistance becomes a sham – even where it exists, it is taken into account in advance; indeed, merely serves to incite new and more subtle processes of oppression."
I feel that the editing process is again a source of oppression, twisting the truth into sub-truths, half-truths, lies.

“...the images presented on the screen are accepted by the subject as its own …the image seems…to perfectly represent the subject” (Copjec 1994: 21, 23).
This point is what post-documentary theory hinges on, from my understanding.

“The [voyeuristic] pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the [exhibitionistic pleasure] that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it…These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (Foucault 1990: 45)
It became clear in the interviewing process that both interviewer and interviewee were in the presence of a gaze (the camera) for which both of us constructed a version of ourselves. Like any game it was both exciting to be playing but the idea of 'losing' (I suppose in this context losing would be to acknowledge that there was any kind of game).