Adding Two ‘New’ Objects to the List: The Gaze and the Voice

Abstract

As of yet, we still have two further objects to bring into consideration in our reading of the Anxiety Seminar, namely the gaze and the voice. Given that our work thus far has crossed paths, time and again, with the peculiar ‘destiny’ allotted to the scopic drive (whether in the organizing form of the mirror stage gestalt, in the uncanny, narcissistic residue of the gaze, or in the structuring frames of perverse and neurotic fantasy), I would like to devote the lion’s share of our attention to what Lacan has to say about the voice, or what Darian Leader refers to as the “invocatory drive” (Leader 2003, 281). First, however, I would briefly like to revisit Lacan’s work on the scopic stage in order to come to a clearer understanding both of the function of the eye, as an anatomical organ, and of the peculiar role that it comes to play once it offers itself as a natural grafting point for the incarnation of the signifier of the Other’s desire. More to the point, what I would like to bring into consideration concerns a striking ‘family resemblance’ between the veritable, ethological mystery of animal mimicry, on the one hand, and, on the other, a peculiar religious practice found in Buddhism.