Visualizing Desire

Vision plays a key role when one thinks of desire. Although vision in and of itself is a synesthetic activity involving the interrelations of all the senses, it is the primary sense when we think of the way desire, unconscious desire in this case, is mobilized. Desire, as conceptualized within psychoanalysis, is [Page 865]central to the construction of identity. Desire is sex/gendered when looking, and hence, the discourse of psychoanalysis has attempted to expose its difficulty, given that the desire of the subject who looks is not confined to biological sex alone. To illustrate visualizing desire, this entry first turns to Jacques Lacan and then to the discussions of desire that surround the art of French painter René Magritte as interpreted by several feminist critics.

Lacan develops the notion of unconscious visual desire in his seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In his lecture, “What Is a Picture?” he recounts the story told by Pliny to demonstrate the generation of desire when looking. It seems that one day, Zeuxis and Parrhasius were having a painting contest to determine who could best paint nature in all its verisimilitude. Zeuxis went away and painted grapes that were so lifelike that birds came and began to peck at them. Overjoyed, he thought that he had won the mimetic prize. Parrhasius, on the other hand, painted a picture of a curtain. Zeuxis came over to see what Parrhasius had painted behind the curtain. When he tried to pull it away, he realized that he been fooled. But it was not the quality of the curtain (in Latin, linteum is translated as “veil”) that fooled Zeuxis. Neither birds nor man need an exact representation to be drawn in. Such gestalts could vary widely in quality and yet serve their purpose. Birds merely required a crude stimulus to be attracted, and Zeuxis was not deceived so much by the representation of the veil (curtain) itself, as by his gaze that had lured him into searching for the fantasy—the fascination for a presence beyond the absence. He had been seduced by desiring to know what lay behind the curtain.

From such a tale, many feminists have written about imagination's desire for that ideal closure—the hidden picture that fulfills fantasy, the final signifier, so to speak, to fulfill the perpetual “lack” that lies beyond our grasp, but paradoxically doesn't exist. The enigma of a heterosexual woman as an unconscious desire for a heterosexual man conceals that there is nothing to conceal. There is “nothing” behind the mask, nothing behind the veil, but another displaced signifier, another veil ad infinitum. With visual desire, we are all caught by appearances as we project the fantasy into the object its ability to make us feel satisfied and whole. In the remainder of this entry, this complexity of visualizing desire is illustrated by the critical reception of two of René Magritte's paintings by feminist critics.