Lacan and Phenomenology (4): Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, the Gaze

We continue our exploration of Lacan's use of phenomenology by turning to his comments on his friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty's posthumously published 'The Visible and the Invisible'. While Lacan clearly opposed any reading of the Mirror Stage that reduced it to phenomenological experience, and any phenomenological attempts to re-conceptualize the Freudian unconscious as merely 'an other side' of consciousness, he did utilize one of Merleau-Ponty's central insights in his theorization of the gaze in Seminar XI. We expand upon how a basic phenomenological idea - to see various points in the world implies that I can myself be seen from all such vantage-points - is developed and further articulated with Lacan's notion of the gaze as opposed to the eye. The concepts of the stain in the visual field and the role of gaze as instantiation of object a are discussed.