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From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us.
For it is in so far as all human desire is based on castration that the eye assumes its virulent, aggressive function….
In the history of western thought the eye, like the phallus, has always been cocked, ready in its own way to shoot. In this context which values sight as the primary sense and the primordial analogue to intellectual knowledge, voyeurism, the desire to see it all, appears as a necessary pathology. Since at least Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the act of looking turns into “voyeurism” when the subject becomes fixated upon looking as the privileged form of sexual pleasure, when looking is substituted for doing, and when what “should” be a means towards copulative pleasure becomes instead an end in itself.
But in a cultural context in which the eye has long borne the standard of metaphysics into the war against appearance and falsehood, the pathology will necessarily appear on, or as, the underside of this same “eye.” As we traverse the penumbrous landscape of the end of metaphysics, the end of the Era of the Eye with its clear and distinct visions, we must also enter into the disturbing field of vision called voyeurism.
I will enter this field by the discursive paths of psychoanalysis and of literature; more specifically, through the work of Jacques Lacan on the Gaze and through Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel, The Voyeur . In the background, remaining for the most part just out of the line of sight, lies the history of philosophy that passes from Plato, through Nietzsche's attempt to move beyond the long “history of an