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In preparation for the 2024 Congress of the New Lacanian School “Clinic of the Gaze”, psychoanalyst Domenico Cosenza shares an excerpt of his presentation, CIVILISATION OF THE IMAGE AND NEW SYMPTOMS: FUNCTION OF THE GAZE. The lecture was delivered in Dublin on April 13th 2024, organised by the Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation, a society of the New Lacanian School.
CIVILISATION OF THE IMAGE AND DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT
Domenico Cosenza
The first point we would like to develop, as a gateway to our discourse on the function of the gaze, concerns a central aspect of the social discourse in which we live: the status of the image in contemporary capitalist society. It is no coincidence that one of the definitions of contemporary capitalism in sociology is precisely, alongside its definition as a consumer society, its status as a civilisation of the image. Indeed, contemporary capitalism places at the centre of its social functioning the imperative to consume; but at the same time it finds in the field of narcissistic identification its most powerful vehicle of orientation towards the realisation of the individual as consumer. Lacan in Radiophonie showed us the underlying dynamic in a double simultaneous movement: the degradation of the signifier and the symbolic function on the one hand; the rise to the social zenith of the object a on the other.[1] In a lecture given in Milan, Lacan also offered us the matheme of the capitalist’s discourse, with which he showed us the ideological structure of this discourse. [2]
The falsity of capitalist discourse consists in the denial of the dimension of the impossible. Now, one of the main ways through which this denial of the impossible is realised in contemporary capitalism, is precisely by the pervasive function of the image. This pervasiveness has also met the condition of its unfolding more intensely in recent decades, through new forms of media and the internet. It is not the media themselves that are the cause of this pervasive relationship, but they provide the technical potential for their unlimited use, which can lead fragile subjects astray.
Other side of this pervasive dimension of the image in the contemporary world emphasised by many authors in the tradition of biopolitical studies, from Foucault to Agamben[3]: the fact that the contemporary world tends to organise itself increasingly as a system of integral and scientific control of bodies.
Wajcman explores this condition of hypervisibility that seems to characterise the contemporary life of individuals, which has never been so prominent in previous eras.[4] But what status can we then attribute today to the function of the gaze, in this condition of hypertrophy of the eye and the visible in which we are immersed?
Lacan distances himself from all postmodern authors who read the contemporary condition as a process of integral reduction to the semblance: there is an irreducible division between the real and the semblant. In this respect, one of his theses that we find in The Sinthome is that the subject is always divided.[5] We can take this thesis of Lacan’s by declining it to try to argue that the split between the eye and the gaze is structural, even where – as in the new symptoms and anorexia nervosa – the subject encounters extreme difficulty in losing the gaze, surrendering it to the Other.
[1] Lacan J. « Radiophonie » (1970), Autres écrits. Paris : Seuil, p.414.
[2] Lacan J. « Del discorso psicoanalitico” (12/05/1972), Lacan in Italia. 1953-1978. Milano: La Salamandra, pp. 27-51 (French and Italian versions).
[3] Agamben G. (2003), Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
[4] Wajcman G. (2010), L’oeil absolu. Paris : Denoel.
[5] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome.1975-1976. Edited by J.-A. Miller, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016.
