The Gaze and Contemporary Shame
Luc Vander Vennet
“Look at them enjoying [Regardez-les-jouir]!”[1] This is how Lacan addresses the students in his seminar, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. He adds that they fulfil “the role of helots.”[2] Who are these helots? They are the slaves who served the Spartans during their military training. They are mistreated during rituals. They are forced to drink large quantities of neat wine in order to get drunk and then dance in a grotesque way during communal meals, in order to show the youth what drunkenness is.
Lacan intends to demonstrate to the students the consequences, at the level of shame, of the passage from the discourse of the Master to this new regime of the perverted Master. The gaze of the Other that shames and limits jouissance has become a gaze that enjoys the spectacle of jouissance that the world has become. Where the students think they have liberated themselves from the Master, from prohibitions and from ideals, and that they can enjoy without limit, they will be displayed by this regime as helots, as objects of an outlandish shame of living.
This Seminar dates from 1969. What about nowadays? The contemporary gaze has become that of the internet. “Look at them enjoying” holds up well. With a single click, one has access to an unlimited menu of pornography. Anyone can post for everyone and without any shame: the gadgets they have, the events they attend, and all the joys of life. This is the age of the self-made-selfie-man, of the self-promotion of a fabricated self that seeks to cover the inaugural division of the subject. The effacement of a shameful gaze is not without this other side of the coin, this return into the real of a gaze that aims to reduce you to a degenerate shame of living. A patient who no longer dares to go out because she feels looked at everywhere after an ex has circulated compromising photos of her, testifies to this. A young teacher, a 14-year-old boy, and others, commit suicide after discovering naked photos of themselves circulating on the internet. Traders have seen their turnover plummet after comments indelibly stigmatise their business. In his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,[3] Jon Ronson gives a whole series of examples. One unfortunate tweet, one tasteless remark, one small plagiarism, and the whole world can come down on you via social networks. He examines this new form of public humiliation, where people try to point out the bad jouissance in others.
Many nightclubs now forbid filming inside or ask you to leave your smart-phone at the entrance. A whole new market of shame is emerging. Specialised websites offer their services to remove all your shameful traces from the web. Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Image Abuse makes all compromising photos and films disappear. Take it down is the latest device that allows young people to erase nude photos. When the imagined gaze in the field of the Other is no longer shameful, a gaze comes back from the real that requires inventions to limit an outlandish shame.
Translation: Raphael Montague