RT Article
T1 The butterfly transformation and the anamorphosis: A posthumanist reading of gaze in Zhuang Zi and Jacques Lacan
JF Asian philosophy
VO 31
IS 3
SP 305
OP 319
A1 Wang, Quan
LA English
PB Carfax
YR 2021
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1760783307
AB Zhuang Zi has a seminal influence on Jacques Lacan. Seeing enables an observer to penetrate into the nature of the examined thing so that he will have a potential mastery over the observed object. Zhuang Zi encourages us to go beyond human vision and to look at the world from the perspective of the gaze of things. The transition from the eye to the gaze ushers us into a posthumanist world in which multiple species constitute a symbiotic existence. Likewise, Lacan rewrites the triple functions of seeing into scientific discourse as “the moment of seeing,” “the stage of understanding,” and “the moment to conclude.” Unlike Zhuang Zi, Lacan confines the gaze within linguistic signifiers and ascribes its elusiveness to castration. This central lack (castration) could only be observed from an oblique perspective, otherwise it will produce anamorphosis. The trajectory from the eye to the gaze constitutes the Lacanian desire.
K1 Lacan
K1 Zhuang Zi
K1 Gaze
K1 Posthumanism
DO 10.1080/09552367.2021.1892300