Jacques Lacan and Cinema: Imaginary, Gaze, Formalisation

Psychoanalysis has always been based on the eclipse of the visual and on the primacy of speech. The work of Jacques Lacan, though, is strangely full of references to the visual field, from the intervention on the mirror stage in the Forties to the elaboration of the object-gaze in the Sixties.

As a consequence, a long tradition of film studies used Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to explain the influence of the subject of the unconscious on the cinematographic experience. What is less known is how the late Lacanian reflection on the topic of analytic formalization opened up a further dimension of the visual that goes beyond the subjective experience of vision: not in the direction of a mystical ineffable but rather toward a subtractive mathematization of space like in non-Euclidean geometries.