Gaze
Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.
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Famous quotes containing the word gaze:
“Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A blind man. I can stare at him
ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?
No, he is in a great solitude.
O, strange joy,
to gaze my fill at a stranger’s face.
No, my thirst is greater than before.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Bind us in time, O seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)