for my class/essay this week on psychoanalysis and the gaze, i read sartre's "the look" chapter from his being and nothingness 1943. even before i started reading him, i had been reading summaries that mentioned him (both surveys of the idea of the gaze and a martin jay chapter about the ontology of vision in sartre & merleau-ponty back when i was doing my cézanne essay) and they all talked about how absolutely terrified sartre was of vision... he saw it as this demonic thing that made you vulnerable to pain and suffering and he saw the relationship between two people (the exchange of looks) as a constant struggle for power, a conflict... someone said it might've been because of hitler's hypnotic gaze, others because of his biography - classically freudian, they said that he had been very close to his mother for the first 12 years of his life because his father had died but when she remarried he felt enormous amounts of angst. so even before i started reading sartre i thought that maybe i would relate to him: i've found that i'm extremely, crippingly self-conscious and this self-consciousness permeates my very being. i'm always so anxious by how im seen by other people, especially 'half-strangers', people who know enough about me to recognise me / talk about me but nothing else who are in the best position to judge me.
i don't know if my state of relentless self-consciousness is because im a woman of color (specifically, an east asian woman, for whom the basis of much discrimination against me is the idea that i'm a perpetual Other, irreconcilably foreign), because i have anxiety (?), or maybe just who i am as a person which i guess would include the above two.
when i finally did read sartre i found him to be really exaggerated as well, especially in his portrayal of the battle of gazes between Me and the Other where we both try to subjugate each other as objects yet must acknowledge each other's subjectivity. like omg dude... calm down. i do think, like, maybe he grew up in an abusive household. i once read this personal story on the internet about triggers: the author's parent would come home and open the garage door to park the car. when the garage door opened it was thus a signal for the author to stop doing whatever they were doing in the living room (like watching tv) and hide and clean up everything to avoid crossing paths with the parent / angering the parent in any way. after many, many years since escaping the abusive household the author didn't live anywhere with a garage but one day heard a garage door noise on tv and that immediately triggered their fight or flight response - they became extremely anxious and stressed and it took a long time for them to recover, just from that noise which brought back all the memories of the end of freedom and the beginning of a tense and violent atmosphere.
to sartre it is also not just the look of the Other that actives Me but anything that could suggest the possibility of being seen - e.g. any noise. his emphasis on shame, fear, and anxiety upon being seen - i think at some point he says "shame is the shame of the self" is also just so saddening to read about... it kind of feels like he might've gone through moments where he needed to hide from someone who wanted to hurt him. because of that i felt weird about identifying with him because i've never been abused or anything like that.... at the same time, sartre is doing philosophy. his goal is to prove the existence of the Other by anchoring it to Me (the self, the cartesian cogito - descartes proved the existence of Me through 'i think therefore i am' but since I have no access to anyone else's thoughts it means that I can't be sure anyone else really exists) so that there can be no Me without the Other, and also the Other is proved through the impact the Other has on Me (proving fire exists using smoke). he uses the gaze to establish that fundamental relationship between Me and the Other - Me is defined only by being seen by the Other (it would never occur to me to define myself if i was always alone - there would be no mediation between me and me). so since sartre is doing philosophy, everythign he says is meant to be universal, even if it does turn out to be informed by extremely personal experiences. of course that's what makes philosophers different from each other.
anyway, so i did kind of identify with sartre a bit. here are some quotes i noted down. from the Hazel Barnes translation, 1966.
"I see myself because somebody sees me." (260)
"The look does not carve me out in the universe. It comes to reach me at the heart of my situation and grasps me only in irresolvable relations with instruments. If I am seen as seated, I must be seen as 'seated-on-a-chair'." (263)
"Every act performed against the Other can on principle be for the Other an instrument which will serve him against me." (264) - this, about My freedoms being limited when the look (judgement) of the Other is applied, is so pessimistic and sad and dramatic. is everything really such a struggle? :(
"Thus the Me-as-object-for-myself is a Me which is not Me; that is, which does not have the characteristics of consciousness. It is a degraded consciousness; objectivation is a radical metamorphosis. Even if I could see myself clearly and distinctly as an object, what I should see would not be the adequate representation of what I am in myself and for myself (...) but the apprehension of my being-outside-myself, for the Other (...) which does not refer to myself at all." (273)
this was really compelling to me. i think it's a good way to describe how it feels to internalise racism/misogyny because you see yourself the way the white man sees you - as object both philosophically (dissociatively - not-Me) and patriarchally (sub-human, of less value) - and therefore marginalised, never the center of my own universe, object even when i am subject. it is impossible for me to see myself as truly myself because i have been overpoweringly exposed to the male/white gaze which objectifies me and turns me into passive image (laura mulvey).
im kind of bored of writign this so im just going to put in the artwork that i talked a bit about in my essay without any commentary.
Adrian Piper - Self-Portrait Exaggerating my Negroid Features (1981)
