Description
While ontological security studies (OSS) of international politics centers around security of subjectivity and identity, it has not engaged with the scopic and visual aspects of security, or how seeing/looking and being seen/looked back at in the international Symbolic order may shape the “I” of the sovereign subject and her attempts to secure it. Combining insights from the “visual turn” literature in International Relations (IR) and the Lacanian theory of the subject, the article focuses on the phenomenon of “the gaze” as a structural position in the visual field of the Other where the subject’s illusion of self-mastery is exposed as she is looked back at “from all sides”. It builds on the Lacanian argument that the gaze lays bare the subject’s quest for objet petit a, the fantasmatic object-cause of desire, to remedy her ontological lack and become whole, thus capturing vulnerabilities and insecurities arising from scopic exposure in the Symbolic. To empirically illustrate its theoretical propositions, the research psychoanalyzes Iran’s strong aversion to “direct” negotiations with the United States over its nuclear program despite the massive normative and material costs of such refusal. It contends that the Iranian revolutionary subject’s rejection of face-to-face talks with the US has less to do with the outcome of such negotiations, as the Islamic Republic leadership often publicly claims, than with efforts to keep at bay ontological anxieties and uncertainties about the state’s fantasized revolutionary self generated by experience of the gaze in that subject position.
