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The notion of the gaze has been profoundly influential in recent discussions of representation. The general conception is that the gaze is an instrument of power — simply in being looked at, one is subordinated. Power resides on the side of the looker, who wields the gaze like a weapon. Most commonly within patriarchal cultural formations, it is, as John Berger (1972) argued in Ways of Seeing, men who do the looking, and women who are the objects surveyed. In E. Ann Kaplan's (1990) phrasing, the gaze is, more often than not, male.
Deriving much of its impetus from Lacanian film theory, this approach to the power dynamics of the process of looking has yielded all manner of interesting results when applied to images from films, art, and the popular media. However, despite the initial linking of this type of analysis with Lacanian theory, it has been pointed out by Joan Copjec (1994, pp. 5-38) and Kaja Silverman (1992, p. 130) that the gaze referred to above is not the Lacanian gaze. The aim of this paper is to explore in greater detail some aspects of Lacan's conception of the gaze, aided in part by a close textual analysis of some of the relevant passages in his work, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1986).
What is the Lacanian gaze? If the gaze of film theory is that element which grants the looker power, the Lacanian gaze is everything in the visual field except the look of the person “looking.” It is thus necessary to differentiate between the “look” and the “gaze.” Perhaps the clearest way to get at this notion concerns Lacan's (1986) commentary, contained in chapter seven of the Four Concepts, on Sartre's (1957) story in Being and Nothingness of the voyeur at the keyhole, shamed when surprised by someone else seeing his looking (p. 277). For Sartre, the key element is the presence of others: it is being caught by someone that causes the shame. The voyeur has fallen victim to, been trumped by, someone else's look. For Lacan, by contrast, the