What is a Picture by Jacques Lacan

This chapter is not in 3rd edition of course reader, but found it online with the assistance of a comment to a previous (now deleted) post.

Lacan describes the superimposition of two triangles as the scopic register.

The superimposition of the gaze and the subject of representation is 'the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible.'

"What determines me...is the gaze that is outside."

This is not about representation. When presented with a representation, I know what that it is a representation that 'there is, beyond, the thing, the thing itself.'

Lacan evidences this statement with mimicry, using examples of sexual union and death. In the first, the male (usually) gives something like a mask and it this 'doubling' that assists the conjunction that precedes renewal. The difference between the use of masks by humans and animals is that man 'knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze'.

The way the screen extracts an image from an object, is similar to the way in which mimicry alters the appearance on the object; it separates an object from its actual appearance and makes it something other than it is. Lacan compares mimicry in the animal kingdom with mimesis in art by means of creating a comfortable and fitting space for the animal with the cohesive perception of a picture or object.

He points out that it is through the gaze which we are “photo-graphed”, it is through the gaze that we become mere representations. Everything is an illusion, like the paint applied by the painters brush is not choice, but rather something else behind the phenomenon that is the picture.

Reality is marginal and way too intense for us to ever actually see it so Lacan suggests that we must then create things to fill this void of the unknown. Like animals we attempt to fill it through mimicry, creating is our way of coping with our void, of taming desire.


The gaze is different from the eye as it is a complicated network of relations, whereas the eye is one point. For Lacan, a “picture” is a kind of trap for the gaze, inasmuch as it puts the viewer into the hypothetical position of the eye, even though the picture is also inevitably social and psychological. He invented the phrase dompte-regard (literally 'tame-gaze' and a play of sorts on trompe l’oeil) to describe this function of the picture as a gaze-tamer. 

Freud does not know the value of  'artistic creation'; his aim is to find the 'the function that the artist's original phantasy played in his creation.'

Lacan mentions the concept of objet petit a. Simply, this may be seen as the gap between biological and psychological desire, the reconciliation of the fact that humans have common desires, but manifested in individual ways - the uniqueness of desire is explained by the objet petit a.