We all know the uncanny moments in our everyday lives when we catch sight of our own image and this image is not looking back at us. I remember once trying to inspect a strange growth on the side of my head using a double mirror, when, all of a sudden, I caught a glimpse of my face from the profile. The image replicated all my gestures, but in a weird uncoordinated way. In such a situation, "our specular image is torn away from us and, crucially, our look is no longer looking at ourselves." It is in such weird experiences that one catches what Lacan called gaze as objet petit a, the part of our image which eludes the mirror-like symmetrical relationship.
Thus, the alien gaze, which as Zizek demonstrates need not be that of an actual empirical person, disturbs the satisfying fullness of our self-image. The gaze of the Other refers precisely to the fact that I am seen from a point which is outside me and that I can never occupy or control. A part of my image ‘belongs’ to the Other and the object that I am for Others is not the me as I am for myself.
I was reminded of the above, curiously enough, by two blogsites, previously mentioned – ‘Biased BBC’ and ‘No Pasaran’ , of no interest in themselves save as symptoms of some yet-unnamed malaise. At ‘Biased BBC’ one finds that many contributors are Americans objecting to how Bush is represented by the BBC, relying on their trusty (and in some cases only) friend Google to nitpick and sift hours of irrelevant dross. So, why should a Bushite U.S. citizen, who does not even pay a licence fee, bother about this? Well, perhaps for the same reason that the Americans at No Pasaran seek to ridicule the French’s opposition to the Iraq war etc. In both cases, they see the ‘growth on their neck’.
In other words, the BBC - or the Le Monde or whoever - represent the alien gaze, the point from which Americans appear strange to themselves. Inspecting BBC or French coverage, they catch, as it were, a view of their face in profile. They are seen from a place from which they cannot see themselves, so that a portion of their being escapes them, like the outside of a mirror, producing a kind of symbolic castration.
It is this gaze which they wish to deny/ recuperate/ co-opt, so as to remain inside their own Imaginary space. They would prefer a world where nobody is looking at them from a position (cultural or political) external to them, and the only way to do this, presumably, is the cultural and political domination of the globe.
Incidentally, in a rather different context, Yeats has some lines on the ‘gaze of the Other’ which catch exactly what is at stake:
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyesCasts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
Yeats, ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul’