A Reading from Jacques Lacan's Seminar From an Other to the other I - [excerpt]

Jacques-Alain Miller · original page

[...]

Lacan strives to underline that there is no symmetry between exhibitionism and voyeurism and between masochism and sadism; nevertheless, the relationship he establishes between exhibitionism and voyeurism is parallel to that of the masochist and the sadist.

Making an appearance here is the rotating function of the objet a that we find singularly situated in the same way by the exhibitionist and by the masochist, while a second maneuver is that of the voyeur and the sadist. We have, in fact, an extremely precise quaternary schema which only appears when the text is cleared of its dross and one can look for its internal logic.

Let us follow these things in Lacan. We understand that the correct operation of the exhibitionist is to fill in the hole in the Other by making the gaze appear in the field of the Other, which is to be distinguished from the set-up in voyeurism. The exhibitionist is, in effect, grabbed by the jouissance of the Other's watchful eye. This schema functions in what I have called the radical exteriority of jouissance in relationship to the Other, and it captures jouissance in the field of the Other through the operation of the exhibitionist.

I might be tempted to place great value in the term "exhibitionist act," to which Lacan is not indifferent, the term having figured in the Seminar L'acte psychanalytique. It is an act inasmuch as it accomplishes an epiphany of the objet a as gaze.

[...]

L'orientation lacanienne, Paris, Winter 2006 - text and notes in French edited by Catherine Bonningue and published in la Cause freudienne 64, Paris, October 2006.

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