Theater without Spectators

Abstract

Is an image an object of reality with substantiality and permanence? An object which calls for a subject who should only adequate itself to it? Traditional theories of vision are based on the separation between an active subject of vision (percipiens) and a passive object (perceptum): there is truth only in the adequancy of the former to the latter. Vision is like an arrow launched by the subject to the object with no real consistency in itself. What is the relation of psychoanalysis to that? While in the imaginary (for example in Lacan's theorization of the mirror stage) image is a means in order to give the illusion of a fake One; a symbolic image is rather treated as a signifier that should be given away in order to reveal the signified which lies behind. It's only with the theorziation of the object-gaze (in Lacan's XI Seminar) that psychoanalysis is actually able to address in defined terms the problem of vision. Neither on the side of the subject, nor on the side of the object of vision, the object-gaze gives room to an intransitive dimension of vision which is neither active nor passive. A dimension of vision which is actually standing for the desiring dimension of space itself.