Sartre's 'New Gaze' in Saint Genet: a Lacanian Reading

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).