Copjec, Joan. “The Censorship of Interiority.” Umbra A Journal of the Unconscious. 2009. 165-186.
The gaze, he says, cannot be matched to an actual pair of eyes; it is not locatable in a person. The gaze has no bearer, belongs to no one. If, feeling a gaze rest upon me, I scan the subway car to try to pin it on some suspicious-looking person, the experience of the gaze will evaporate at each point on which my accusation alights.
There is a fantasmatic dimension of the gaze that suggests it cannot be contained within an intersubjective dialectic.
But, in the end, Sartre does not follow up on this suggestion and thus the a-personal dimension of the gaze serves in his account merely to enhance the power of the Other by effacing his limits.
The fact that I cannot attach it to the actual eyes of an objectified other gives the gaze all the more power to objectify and limit me. This is a point Val Lewton, the legendary producer of horror films, well understood: do not show the horrible thing directly embodied in a person, for this will only have the effect of attenuating the threat. 181
Lacan reads the fantasmatic dimension of the gaze differently. There is no warrant, he argues, for Sartre’s placement of the gaze exclusively on the side of an adversarial other. Detached from every observer, it is detached, too, from the voyeur and not only from the Other.
It is as if, through participation in the social or public field, the voyeur were lent a gaze by which he is permitted to see himself appear.
The gaze lends the subject the exteriority or detachment necessary to look back and see the one thing he was unable to see: his own appearance. What this recurvant gaze sees, however, is not merely the subject’s emergent image, but the detachment that permits it to emerge. My image is my disguise, my veil; it enables me to appear in public while preserving my privacy.
In a gesture of sleazy flattery, Behzad tries to establish some silly points of coincidence between Zeynab and Forugh, the leading Persian poet of the twentieth century. There is absolutely no sign, however, that Zeynab is interested in being like the poet. What interests Zeynab is dissimulation (the possibility of which is opened by the poem), the possibility of being able to present herself in public while remaining concealed.