Vol. 10 · No. 1 · 2004
Sartre's 'New Gaze' in Saint Genet
A Lacanian Reading

Guillermine De Lacoste

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Abstract
The theory of the gaze elaborated in L'Etre et le Néant has long been a classic, used, quoted and criticised by a plethora of writers, Lacan among them. There are at least ten references to Sartre's gaze in Lacan's Séminaires from 1954 to 1964. In an essay entitled 'A Lacanian Elucidation of Sartre', in which I used Lacan's terminology on neurosis, I called the gaze the first phobia of the neurotic. I viewed it and the other two phobias I discerned in L'Etre et le Néant (le trouble and the viscous) as forming a link in the chain of Sartre's autoanalytical writings (from La Nausée through L'Etre et le Néant, Baudelaire, Saint Genet, to L'Idiot de la famille).1 I suggested that these writings eventually enabled Sartre to come to terms with his neurosis, but I devoted a mere five lines to Saint Genet. In the present paper, I hope to do it (at least partial) justice. Its great interest lies in the new gaze, with its deep libidinal focus, which Sartre, following Genet himself, sees at the core of Genet's life and writings, and in the fact that with this new gaze Sartre has, once again, anteceded Lacan.