Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2025
DOI:
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Wandering Ghosts – An Analysis of Subcultural Phenomena from the Perspective of the Gaze
Yuan Cao
ABSTRACT:
The research takes Lacan’s psychoanalysis as the main clue to develop a discussion on the unique conditions for the occurrence of the gaze in contemporary subcultural art phenomena. In this article, two representative phenomena are taken as the starting point, and Lacan’s basic condition of the object gaze from the perspective of the dialectic of desire – the outbreak of a fundamental lack hidden by the symbolic order of the subject – is taken as a precondition. Taking Y2k and retro-futurism art styles, and Otaku phenomenon as examples, respectively, try to take both temporal and structural conditions to deepen and supplement Lacan’s interpretation in contemporary contexts. At the same time, this article will first take the contrast between Sartre’s subjective gaze and Lacan’s object gaze as a point of departure to position the ontological location of the gaze, and supplement the epistemology with the Lacanian psychoanalytic dialectic of desire and the primordial driving force of the Real on cognition. Subsequently, the article will analyze the occurrence of the object gaze in these contemporary cultural phenomena through the use of psychoanalysis and Derrida’s “Hauntology” approach, and finally explain the differences in the conditions under which the gaze occurs in contemporary subcultural phenomena.
keywords: object gaze，lack，temporal，structural