Changes

In this perspective he gives an account of his lectures in the United States, organized by Roman Jakobson, notably "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever," at Johns Hopkins University. Michel Foucault talks about Velasquez's Las Meninas. His address allows Lacan to conjure his theory of the painting as "a trap for the gaze," a gaze in which what falls is objet a. The little girl is the slit in the perspective and the vanishing point, the hidden center of the painting, and "in this gap, béance where there is nothing to see, it is impossible to recognize the structure of the objets a: underneath the Infanta's dresses, 'it looks at me,' while the eye is made not to see..." Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil is quoted as a text that establishes a connection among all the objets a in their rapport to the feminine sexual organ. Therefore, the phallus is the sign that occupies the place of this gap, the impossible or untenable real. This entails a reshaping of the unconscious around language and the gaze (excluded by Freud). Lacan goes back to to the Freudian dimension of desire and of the subject whose foundation is castration. The vagina, the feminine sexual organ, becomes the objet a, which fascinates and leads to ruin unless there is the screen of the phallus, even under the form of - F. In the end, the penis, as a manifestation that is seen, hardly hides the presence of an objet a that would be an enigmatic - a.

The gaze, it should be noted, is not found on the side of the subject, but on that of the object. "It marks the point in the object (the picture) from which the viewing subject is already gazed at" (Slavoj Zizek). The gaze is a spot in the picture, which does not warrant the presence of the subject and by blurring its visibility, introduces a split in the rapport between the object and the subject: the latter cannot see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at him. Zizek brings out Psycho, where Norman Bates' house is rendered uncanny because Hitchcok's viewpoint switches from the house coming closer (as seen by the approaching woman) to the same woman coming closer (as seen from the house), giving the anxious impression that the house is gazing at her.