Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
. . . If desire arises by art, it pursues an internal erotic organization "beyond appearance" and not an organization of representations or a "pure" perception, and therefore its effects can't be prescribed. Painting touches us by what beyond the visible evokes phantasm and aims at our trauma by way of an "impossible" encounter between present and archaic. "Impossible" for Lacan, since in the phallic conception of the psyche, if the object appears, the subject disappears. They structurally replace each other, and so their impossible meeting on the screen of phantasm is incarnated by a gaze qua lack. We chase the gaze, we are yearning to be looked at by it, but the gaze is beheld by the Other, and the Other is recklessly cut away from me. The Other doesn't look at me from where I look, nor from where I would like to be seen, and desperately "what I look at is never what I wish to see." (17)
Copyright © 1999, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, all rights reserved
