This article aims to investigate Abbott H. Thayer's concept of mimicry (1909) and discuss it together with the concept of the gaze in Lacan's seminar 11 ([1964] 1988). Since Lacan only knew Thayer indirectly - through Caillois's (1962) work - and there are surprising conceptual affinities between them, we explored a theoretical meeting point between the two authors that has not yet been discussed in psychoanalytic literature. The meeting point is a law formulated by Thayer that describes how animals seek more in mimicry than just to disappear from the scene, but to seem to cease to exist at all. By asking what would guarantee this mode of disappearance, we concluded that the gaze, as a point of light in Lacan’s theory, is the final object of this effect: because it has as one of its potentials the ability to “literally kill life” ([1964] 1988, 117). With this reading key, we find that the supplementary concepts related to the scopic field in seminar 11 (stain, screen, picture, subject's inscription on the picture) become clearer, and we can better highlight a rarely debated dimension of Lacan’s concept of the gaze that seems essential to us: the destructiveness, the anti-life.