Saving Xavier Auduard

28/01 ---- 11Dog -------- k50 ----- 19/07: {lot}

Kunze 17m

Jacques Lacan called his friend Xavier Auduard on the morning of May 15, 1966, to ask him to make a short presentation during session 18. Audouard hastily assembled his notes and a few drawings. When he redrew his diagrams for the audience, however, they seemed hard to understand. The labelling was confusing and Lacan took them to be about binocular vision. This was not the case. Closer inspection shows that Audoard's thesis revises our view of Lacan's famous "butterfly" diagram from Seminar XI, where the look and gaze are related by two intersecting triangles representing cones of vision. Audouard used two criss-cross parallelograms to emphasize the role of "cathesis," the constancy that held the two cones of vision (dilation) together. This is a rather visually boring video, but the thesis is potentially revolutionary. It suggests that Audouard gives us a visual means of connecting dilation and cathesis to the ancient phenomenon of "ostentum," the Roman type of divine sign that happened in visual perception. Ostenta have not disappeared with the times. Popular culture — film, literature, painting — depends on the logic of the ostentum to induce surprise and suspense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmzo2Fr2Gm4

Saving Xavier Auduard
Donald Kunze
2.89K subscribers
80 views  Jan 28, 2026