A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

The Gaze as philosophical and psychoanalytic trope functions both through the
personalized other and the depersonalized Other. The former is exemplified in Sartre’s parable
of the watcher in the park, while the latter takes on its most seminal form in Lacan’s discussion
of the sardine can. Both of these examples are discussed by Norman Bryson in his essay “The
Gaze in the Expanded Field,” an essay that I draw on extensively in the following discussion. 306
Both formulations of the Gaze are central in defining psychoanalysis’ and the hypnotherapist’s
relation to the visual economy of abduction and both are key to a structural analysis of the
abduction narrative. Sartre describes entering a park and finding himself alone. “Everything in
the park is there for him to regard from an unchallenged center of the visual field...The subject
resides at the still point of the turning world, master of its prospects, sovereign surveyor of the
scene.” In a second moment, this sovereignty is threatened. Another enters the park and the
“watcher is in turn watched ... the viewer becomes spectacle to another’s sight.” 307
Under the
gaze of the other, the subject becomes object—opaque, emptied of interiority. Sartre further
feared that the very possibility of freedom is undermined by the look of the other. “I grasp the
Other’s look at the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own
possibilities.” 308
Becoming an object of another’s gaze fundamentally undermines the subject’s
sense of self and the self’s attendant capacities. The emotional responses to falling under the
gaze of the Other as understood by Sartre are central to the abduction scenario. Martin Jay
argues that “Shame can be called the transcendental emotional a priori of Sartre’s universe of
threatening gazes, so pervasive is it in his description of the result of being seen.” 309
One
306 Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press,
1988).
307 Bryson, 88-89.
308 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: a Phenomenological essay on Ontology (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1966).
309 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994) 289.
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