Lacan's 'L' (or 'lambda' = λ) schema [1954-1955; the 'imaginary axis' is customarily associated with the 'mirror phase'; Lacan, J,1977, Écrits, trans A Sheridan, New York, Norton, 193]. Photo taken by the authors.

Context in source publication

Context 1

... the context of landscapes we can immediately see two distinct if interrelated fields worthy of further analysis: (1) the advent, as it were, behind our backs, 37 of the constructed nature of landscapes and (2) the transient vacuity of the pointing gesture: the 'can't you see, that's [x] there' that is always open to misrecognition, not the least because the materiality of the 'eye' and every image-creating 'gaze', as Lacan reminded us, 38 take place in differently embodied registers that meet in space. It is this 'meeting' that concerns us here, defining and relying on a space that simultaneously belongs to us in the form of the 2-m extension into space that clear-sighted humans command in every effort to see without consciously focussing (known as an 'empirical binocular horopter', or, in ophthalmology as the 'Vieth-Müller circle') and which simultaneously envelopes and elopes us, as famously depicted in Lacan's 1955 'L' scheme ( Figure 3): ...