Lacan (in evolution) the Eye and the Gaze

Levis Strauss’s Structural Anthropological approach connecting theories for psychoanalysis to the switch from the animal unconscious phase to the conscious  in the evolution of culture was, until now, my only substantial recollection of the applicability of Lacan’s theories.  

Lacan’s ideas, however, were particularly influential not only to the formation of the structuralist though of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levis-Strauss, but in connection to a wide range of other disciplines. Therefore, a claimed freudian, Lacan used and reworked many theories and thoughts of his contemporary. He forward the idea of the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, setting the basis for his pragmatic approach and interpretation of psychoanalysis, over which he built theories such as that of the Mirror Stage attempting to explain the evolution of the I through self identification. 

The idea of the tree registers seems to set the stage and determine the basis for Lacan’s own rethinking. The imaginary, for example, is central of his account of ego formation in the mirror stage, and the imaginary is then dependent on the symbology. This dependency means that more sensory-perceptual phenomena (images and experiences of one's body, consciously lived emotions, envisioning of the thoughts and feelings of others) are determined by socio-linguistic structures and dynamics (the Imaginary and the Symbolic,when taken together constitute the field of reality).  These registers are also often mistaken for one another (e.g the real often mis-recognized as symbolic and vice versa)

With the essay on the Eye and the Gaze Lacan yet seems to add an additional layer to his logic. It seems that Lacan’s concept of the split is a rework of Freudian concepts of unconsciousness and the compulsion to repeat. The gaze is, on the other hand parallel to the castration anxiety and functions to determine the subjectivity of the human being within the scopic field. Lacan in this context also appropriated Merlau Ponty’s phenomenological model recognizing a reversibility in vision. The body becomes in this instance both object and subject, seeing and being seen. Lacan, however, changes this idea of reversibility adding the notion of the being observed (not only something see and it is seen but it is also observed from external gazes). Lacan entails that subjectivity is determined through a gaze placing the subject under observation, and causing (the subject) to experience himself as an object which is seen.  

The gaze alienates subjects from themselves by causing them to identify as the objects of desire, at the same time desiring scopic satisfaction. In constructing the human subject as the objet, the gaze denies the subject its full subjectivity. The subject becomes the object of desire by identifying with the desire (or object of desire) and become alienated from itself.

The intermediate space between the eye and the gaze is the screen- consisting in the in between space of projected images. Lacan imaginary space is the way subjectivity is mediated by the images appearing on the screen.

“man's desire is the desire of the Other.”