Have read the passage three times and as with all of Lacan's work I remain unsure of what he is saying or trying to say. As is usual I did a web search to see if there was any entries that at least would offer a clue or a firm foundation on which I could build my ideas. I found none that seemed relevant although as always came across a number of articles vilifying Lacan and his ideas. I then followed through the requirement to read the article by Kaja Silverman - The Subject as it is suggested reading this article "may help". It is worth quoting from this work:
"Lacan's prose is notoriously remote, and his presentation deliberately a-systematic. Many of the terms to which he most frequently returns constantly shift meaning. These qualities make it almost impossible to offer definitive statements about the Lacanian argument; indeed, Lacan himself almost never agreed with his commentators." [visual culture: the reader; eds jessica evans and stuart hall; Sage Publications 2010 p 340].
Silverman avoids the problems that this raises for her as a commentator by "not attempt{ing} a comprehensive survey of the Lacanian argument, but will focus instead on those parts of it which have proved most assimilable to a broader psychoanalytic theory.." [Ibid pp 340-341]. It seems to be less than good academic practice to cherry pick those parts that support one's theory and even then ignore the problems with these parts that remain unclear or wrong. [see reference to Lacan's theory of the mirror image ibid p344 where she fails to address the question of the congenitally blind child and Lacan's initial belief that the mirror stage occurred at round about 4 months.
It would seem that having argued that Lacan "almost never agreed with his commentators" Silverman fails to see the irony of her being a commentator with whom Lacan would most likely disagree. I found the article less than helpful and, indeed, added to my confusion.
To add to my confusion further is the reference to an earlier statement by Lacan in the seminar that has been translated "the picture is in my eye but I am not in the picture" It is stated that this is arguably a mistranslation of the original but it is difficult to see how this has arisen - the negative in French is not easily mistaken. We are not offered the original statement in French for us to make a judgement or on what grounds the arguable case is put forward. In the text we were required to read Lacan states "I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say I am a picture" [The Visual Culture Reader ed Nicholas Mirzoeff 2nd edn Routledge 2002 p 126]. It is interesting to consider whether someone who is the picture is in or not in that picture.
I also found it difficult to relate the screen in Lacan's work with the description in the Course material where it is described as being something that 'cuts us off from something, like the screen around a hospital bed'. I would suggest that that Lacan's idea of a screen is different. He argues that the subject "isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen here is the locus of mediation" [ibid p128]. I would suggest that the screen is, as suggested in the Course material, our cultural conditioning but far from being an obstacle to 'seeing' we are able to see through the screen, albeit faintly and with a degree of distortion the 'reality' beyond it - we are able to mediate.
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