En 2001, le philosophe slovène Slavoj Žižek analysait le besoin du regard de l’Autre, avec l’arrivée de nouveaux outils numériques.
Does not the recent trend of « web cam » sites that realize the logic of The Truman Show (in these sites, we are able to follow continuously of some event or place: the life of a person in her apartment the view on a street, etc.) display this same urgent need for the fantasmatic Other’s gaze serving as the guarantee of the subject’s being? « I exist only insofar as I am looked at all the time. »‘ (Similar to this is the phenomenon, noted by Claude Lefort, of the TV set that is left on all the time, even when no one effectively watches it, serving as the minimum guarantee of the existence of social link.) The situation is here thus the tragicomic reversal of the Bentham-Orwellian notion of panopticon society in which we are (potentially) « observed all the time’ and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the power: here, anxiety arises from the prospect of not being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as kind of ontological guarantee of his being…
Slavoj Žižek, « Enjoy your symptom! », p. 230
Des équilibres 