lacan gaze theory


The First wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. Although in his essay on the mirror stage Lacan conceives of the gaze as a mastering gaze, he thought of it … The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. However, many of these critics have conflated Lacan's concept of the gaze with the Sartrean concept of the gaze and other ideas on vision such as Foucault's account of panopticism. Psychoanalysis entered into film theory in the 1970s with Laura Mulvey’s seminal paper Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema (1975). Film Theory. Joan Copjec accuses orthodox film theory of misrepresenting the Lacanian gaze by assimilating it to Foucauldian panopticon (Copjec 1994: 18–19). The power of the gaze as a theoretical concept emerged from the psychoanalytical framework of Jacques Lacan’s Of the Gaze as Objet Petit A.In film theory, the gaze refers to the objectifying process whereby the eye fixes upon the objet petit a, which reveals power dynamics between individuals. The Male Gaze Theory. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a “blind spot” in the subject’s perception of visible reality, “disturbing its transparent visibility” (Zizek, 1999a: 79). These lie beyond the scope of this paper, but as it relates to my work, I believe the gaze is a powerful and recurrent element, despite being unrelated to … A gaze is an important medium for communication, although a lot of internal contradictions still exist in contemporary art criticism about its role in the relationship between spectator and object and its extension in to social theory. The concept of the gaze was waken up by psychoanalytic film criticism in the 1970s, especially by feminist film critics. Thus, the gaze corresponds to desire, the desire for self-completion through the other. The failure of traditional Lacanian film theory to employ Lacan's own concepts condemned its adherents to analyses that never saw the traumatic nature of the gaze in the cinematic experience.For the opponents of Lacanian film theory, the latter fails because it casts too wide a net and explains too much-because it is too rigidly Lacanian. "The eye and the gaze--this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field." The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s. the gaze plays within filmic experience.10 In short, the Post-Theory critique of Lacanian film theory has not really addressed a properly Lacanian film theory. In this permutation the gaze is the unattainable object of desire that seemed to make the other complete. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men. Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes of the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory.The theory is separated into two waves. What it bears witness to is the subject’s inability to fully frame the objects that appear within his/her field of vision. Initially, its core concepts: the id (the primal, impulsive and selfish part of the psyche), the ego (the realistic mediator between id and super-ego) and the super-ego (the moral conscience) were established by Sigmund Freud (Freud,… JACQUES LACAN has proven to be an important influence on contemporary critical theory, influencing such disparate approaches as feminism (through, for example, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman), film theory (Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, and the various film scholars associated with "screen theory"), poststructuralism (Cynthia Chase, Juliet Flower MacCannell, etc. Locating the Gaze. The gaze therefore extends beyond the gender applications typical of more recent adaptations of Lacan’s writings to media theory.