Intersubjective Reciprocity

Intersubjective Reciprocity names the misapprehension Lacan diagnoses — and explicitly rejects — when describing the structure of the scopic drive and the gaze. The concept designates a symmetrical or reversible relation between two perspectival positions: a figure-plane and a ground/look-plane, each capable of projecting onto the other along a shared horizon line, each constituting the other's viewpoint in a mutual exchange. It is the commonsense, imaginary model of vision — the assumption that seeing is a two-way street in which subject and world, viewer and picture, look and image, can occupy equivalent and exchangeable positions. Lacan invokes it precisely to mark what the topology of the scopic drive is not.

The error Audouard makes in reconstructing projective geometry — treating the ground-plane and picture-plane as capable of projecting onto each other along a horizon — exemplifies the seduction of this imaginary symmetry, what the quote calls "the permanent vertigo of intersubjectivity." Lacan's corrective is topological: the drive does not move between two poles in a reversible arc but executes a one-way circuit around the objet petit a, looping around an irreducible asymmetric remainder. The gaze is not the other subject's look returning to meet your own; it is the Real-register object-cause of desire — structurally evanescent, non-specularizable, impossible to reciprocate. Intersubjective Reciprocity is therefore the Imaginary trap the theory of the scopic drive must dismantle.

The concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-13 (p. 217) as a foil — a concept introduced in order to be negated — within Lacan's seminar discussion of the scopic drive's topology. Its function is entirely polemical and clarificatory: by naming what the drive is not (an intersubjective reciprocity), Lacan sharpens what it is (a topological circuit around the objet petit a). The concept therefore lives at the intersection of three canonical anchors: the Gaze (whose canonical definition stresses the split between eye and gaze, the asymmetry of "I see from one point, but am looked at from all sides"), the Scopic Drive (a partial drive whose satisfaction lies in the looping circuit, not in any terminal reciprocal exchange), and Objet petit a (the non-specularizable remainder around which the drive circles, never meeting an equivalent "other side").

Against the canonical Drive and Partial Drive, Intersubjective Reciprocity represents the Imaginary fantasy that the drive's aim could be symmetric and terminal — that it could reach and be met by its object. Against the Gaze, it represents the illusion that the visual field is organized by mutual, equivalent looks rather than by a unilateral, evanescent, Real-register stain. The concept also implicitly inverts the Point de capiton logic: whereas the quilting point arrests sliding by imposing a fixed asymmetric anchor, Intersubjective Reciprocity imagines a fluid, mutual stabilization between two equivalent poles — the very "permanent vertigo" Lacan describes as the danger of the imaginary register left unanchored. In the corpus, this is a single, precise, polemical usage; its value is diagnostic rather than constructive.

Seminar XIII · The Object of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1965 (p.217)

a certain reciprocity between the representation that you have called the figure, and what is produced in the plane of the look from which you began... the permanent vertigo of intersubjectivity.

The phrase "permanent vertigo of intersubjectivity" is theoretically loaded because "permanent" signals the non-dialectical, non-resolving character of imaginary mutual mirroring — it does not quilting-point itself into any stable meaning — while "vertigo" captures the phenomenological effect of a structure with no asymmetric anchor, no objet a around which to orient: the visual field spins endlessly between two equivalent perspectives, never grounded in the Real-register object that Lacanian topology insists must be there.