That each of us has been an object-cause-of-desire of the Other is a part of our own phantasy. Thus if the artist sets you up for an ambush, it is as if s/he is saying “you don’t see me from where I look at you,” at the same time as s/he is offering an image that brings you closer to the ache at your own blind spot. The oeuvre (work) is an ouverture (opening) onto a gaze that incarnates in your feeling a place dignifying your self as an objet a for your lost others, or conversely dignifying their psychic site as constituting lost others for you. It is an opening onto a gaze as absence, an absence that feels to you like the mysterious, evasive point of view you desire, from which someone else was once looking at you without you being aware of it, or longing for you with passion and desire. Is there out there in the world such a place where desire meets reality without fading you out of the picture or expelling the gaze? If there is such a place—an echo of a primordial world—art is what brings us as close to it as it is possible to come, although not in the image it presents, but rather in the absence the artwork brings almost within your grasp.
Bracha Ettinger, "Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze"
