Open AccessThe Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek
Author(s) -
Henry Krips
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
culture unbound
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.256
H-Index - 7
ISSN - 2000-1525
DOI - 10.3384/cu.2000.1525.102691
Subject(s) - panopticon , gaze , parallels , michel foucault , politics , epistemology , psychoanalysis , sociology , the imaginary , philosophy , focus (optics) , aesthetics , psychology , law , political science , mechanical engineering , physics , optics , engineering
Joan Copjec accuses orthodox film theory of misrepresenting the Lacanian gaze by assimilating it to Foucauldian panopticon (Copjec 1994: 18-19). Although Copjec is correct that orthodox film theory misrepresents the Lacanian gaze, she, in turn, misrepresents Foucault by choosing to focus exclusively upon those as-pects of his work on the panopticon that have been taken up by orthodox film the-ory (Copjec 1994: 4). In so doing, I argue, Copjec misses key parallels between the Lacanian and Foucauldian concepts of the gaze. More than a narrow academic dispute about how to read Foucault and Lacan, this debate has wider political sig-nificance. In particular, using Slavoj Zizek's work, I show that a correct account of the panoptic gaze leads us to rethink the question of how to oppose modern techniques of surveillance