The article examines Lacan’s use of a personal experience recollected from his recent vacation in Japan, recorded in Seminar X (1962-1963) Anxiety. This experience occurred in connection with a Japanese Buddhist statue, and the contemplative relation Lacan observed with respect to it. Lacan utilises his recollection of this experience in his teaching activity, specifically to introduce the question of the objet a in the scopic field. In order to use this experience Lacan was led in the seminar to comment on the relation between psychoanalysis and Buddhism, specifically on the statement that “desire is illusion” and on the central Buddhist teaching of “non-duality” and the article revisits Lacan’s discussion. Lacan also gave the iconographic references which he understood to characterise the statue in question. Some research work reveals the possible identity of this Buddhist statue, both in terms of its actual location and its iconography and identifies it as the “Pensive Prince” or the Bodhisattva Maitreya, situated in Chūgūji monastery at Nara. The article then offers a commentary and analysis of Lacan’s theory of the relation between the eye and the emerging concept of the gaze, in order to illustrate the operation of desire in the field of vision. It shows how Lacan has utilised an example of sublimation in the scopic field in order to communicate to his listeners a development in his theory concerning the gaze as partial object of the scopic drive as well as an historical-cultural sublimation, as exemplified in the Buddhist statue.
Search
Latest articles
- “I don’t stop; I start again.” The position of the analyst in ‘long term care’By Glenn Strubbe
- Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-sièc…By Hub Zwart
- Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problemBy Evi Verbeke
- The Violence of Right: Rereading ‘Why War?’By Jens De Vleminck
Keywords
Addiction
Aggression
Applied psychoanalysis
Architecture
Art
Body
Case study
Child analysis
Collecting
Death
death drive
desire
ethics
Fantasy
Freud
Gaze
Identity
Institution
interpretation
Jacques Lacan
Jouissance
Lacan
Language
Literature
Memory
Narcissism
Object a
Oedipus
Outsider Art
Psychoanalysis
Psychose
Psychosis
Real
Repetition
Repression
Sade
Signifier
Subject
Sublimation
the Gaze
Transference
Trauma
Unconscious
Violence
Writing