Look and Spectatorship in Manon Lescaut

Abstract

In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre formulated the problem of “the existence of Others” in terms of the subject's relation to its visual field; in particular, in the section entitled “The Look,” his argumentation proceeds through a series of vignettes in which “the subject” appears as if on a stage, confronted by the menacing presence of “the look of the Other.”1 One of these vignettes is particularly poignant, in that it is shaped around an exquisitely dramatic turn of events: Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole… . Behind that door a spectacle is presented as “to be seen,” a conversation as “to be heard.” … The door, the keyhole are at once both instruments and obstacles… . Hence from this moment “I do what I have to do.” But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure… . All of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, … in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other.2

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