One of the principal hypotheses at stake in these studies is that if we acknowledge that the discourse of philosophy is itself a historical construction and that it has often relied on a vision-
generated vocabulary and way of thinking (not only, for example, with words such as speculation, obseruation, insight, reflection, evidence, and intuition, and with metaphors such as minoring, clarity, perspectiae, point of view, horizon of understanding, and the light of reason, but also with certain methodological concepts such as totality, analysis, objectivity, reflective detachment, and representation), even to the extent, sometimes, of drawing on an ocular vocabulary and rhetoric for the construction of a system of thought at the same time that it has constructed a model of the gaze profoundly hostile to the testimony and claims of vision, then we
must also acknowledge that the use and the construction of this vocabulary needs to be examined, together with the discursive effects of such use and construction on the way of thinking that has dominated the history of philosophy.




Psychoanalytic film criticism relies on a conception of vision developed by theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry, who claims that cinema is merely the final and most perfected material realization of the return to the scene of the unconscious'
This realization began, he proposes' in Plato's cave' a prehistoric cinema that produced the first simulated and displaced dream state wherein the unconscious could represent itself. Thus, he
proposes, film's special function is to satis$ narcissism by Providing the subject with visual rePresentations that reproduce images from the unconscious, images that represent a world
ordired by active male subjects and passive females objectified by a controlling male gaze.

	Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy