With the dwindling importance of psychoanalytic film theory since the 1980s, suture theory also seemed to be without a future. Newer paradigms like the debate around masochistic scopophilia initiated by Gaylyn Studlar, and a generalized shift towards the phenomenological body led psychoanalysis’s “anorexic” (Vivian Sobchack) theory of the gaze to appear increasingly obsolete. In fact, apparatus theory, with its dogmatic fixation on Lacan’s specular model of the imaginary, did seem to have maneuvered itself into a dead-end, which was also, unjustly, ascribed to suture theory. For a long time, there was little recognition that, in his later texts, Lacan had developed a theory of the gaze and the image, which in many areas was diametrically opposed to his earlier work on the mirror-stage. The following chapters will strive to bring together suture theory with Lacan’s revised theory of the gaze, a task that has already been initiated by writers such as Kaja Silverman, Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek, but is far from having been systematized.

To draw the full consequences of this theoretical articulation does not entail, however, bringing them in any way closer to contemporary phenomenological and somatic approaches. Although Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are important reference points for Lacan, he formulated a decidedly anti-phenomenological theory. The problem of apparatus theory, I would contend, is not that it is too disembodied, but quite the opposite, that it is not disembodied enough.