Visual Literacy and Transgression: Rereading Vertigo from Lacanian Gaze

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

When touching on "kino-eye" in his Organs without Bodies (2004), Žižek provides an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo's "captivating force of a sublime image," and gives a critique of the "excessive subjective engagement of the theorists in Hitchcock's films," suggesting what he calls "a theory of misrepresentations and mistakes." According to Žižek, critics often blur the borderline between what a viewer sees on the screen and what the viewer invests with his/her libidinal investment in it in the form of hallucinatory supplements or distortions:
In fact, Žižek argues that the shot of Madeleine's profile is totally subjectivized, depicting not what Scottie effectively sees but what he imagines, that is, his hallucinatory inner vision, and that this shot of the profile of Madeleine lets us encounter the "kino-eye" which functions as the "organ-without-body," the camera as a partial object, as an "eye" torn from the subject and freely thrown around. As Žižek perceives, in our daily lives, we encounter the uncanny moments when we catch sight of our own image which is not looking back at us. In other words, our specular image is torn away from us and our look is no longer looking at ourselves.
Žižek's insightful comments is based upon his assumption that "what we see on the screen is the result of well-crafted tricks." Then, why this imaginary distortions and hallucinatory supplements? In fact, Žižek's Lacanian interpretation is insufficient to elaborate the split between the eye and the gaze, the split which is central in the discussion of the drive in relation to desire, subject, and the unconscious manifested in the scopic field. I would argue that one needs a certain elaborate schemata or interpretive topology from which one can visualize what one attempts to say. Gaze in terms of anamorphosis, visual literacy, and the schema of the hoop net is a candidate for such topology, and the modus operandi comes from the concept of transgression. My contention is that if one read Vertigo in terms of what Lacan says rather than what Žižek interprets in a Lacanian perspective, one can encounter a richer version of the analysis of the film under discussion.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

When touching on "kino-eye" in his Organs without Bodies (2004), Žižek provides an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo's "captivating force of a sublime image," and gives a critique of the "excessive subjective engagement of the theorists in Hitchcock's films," suggesting what he calls "a theory of misrepresentations and mistakes." According to Žižek, critics often blur the borderline between what a viewer sees on the screen and what the viewer invests with his/her libidinal investment in it in the form of hallucinatory supplements or distortions:
In fact, Žižek argues that the shot of Madeleine's profile is totally subjectivized, depicting not what Scottie effectively sees but what he imagines, that is, his hallucinatory inner vision, and that this shot of the profile of Madeleine lets us encounter the "kino-eye" which functions as the "organ-without-body," the camera as a partial object, as an "eye" torn from the subject and freely thrown around. As Žižek perceives, in our daily lives, we encounter the uncanny moments when we catch sight of our own image which is not looking back at us. In other words, our specular image is torn away from us and our look is no longer looking at ourselves.
Žižek's insightful comments is based upon his assumption that "what we see on the screen is the result of well-crafted tricks." Then, why this imaginary distortions and hallucinatory supplements? In fact, Žižek's Lacanian interpretation is insufficient to elaborate the split between the eye and the gaze, the split which is central in the discussion of the drive in relation to desire, subject, and the unconscious manifested in the scopic field. I would argue that one needs a certain elaborate schemata or interpretive topology from which one can visualize what one attempts to say. Gaze in terms of anamorphosis, visual literacy, and the schema of the hoop net is a candidate for such topology, and the modus operandi comes from the concept of transgression. My contention is that if one read Vertigo in terms of what Lacan says rather than what Žižek interprets in a Lacanian perspective, one can encounter a richer version of the analysis of the film under discussion.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 Image of vertigo,

2 Image of Vertigo & plot summary,

3 Anonymous, "Youtube on Vertigo"

4 Hitchcock, A., "Vertigo (film). Wikipedia"

5 Freud, S, "Three Essays on Sexuality" New York: Basic Books., 1905

6 Lacan, J., "The Split between the Eye and the Gaze." Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" New York: Norton 1978

7 Lacan, J., "Presence of the Analyst." Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" New York: Norton 1978

8 Žižek, S., "Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences" Routledge: New York and London 2004

9 Kim, Youngmin., "Lacanian Negative Anamorphosis and the Poetics of Eye/Gaze in Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poetry" 9 (9): 193-216, 2007

10 Anonymous, ""What is `Visual Literacy?'" International Visual Literacy Association"

11 Lacan, J., ""What Is A Picture?" Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" New York: Norton 1978

12 Anonymous, ""Visual Literacy." 21st Century Literacies"

13 Anonymous, ""Transgression." Wikipedia"

14 Lacan, J., ""The Line and Light." Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" New York: Norton 1978

15 Anonymous, ""Dolly Zoom." Wikipedia"

16 Anonymous, ""Dolly Zoom." Vertigo Effect. Wikipedia"

17 Lacan, J., ""Anamorphosis." Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis" New York: Norton 1978

18 Anonymous, ""Anamorphic Lens." Wikipedia"