the play's the thing

'Dans ses yeux je vois ma perte écrite,'
'In her eyes I see inscribed my loss.'
Suspense is never the product of a simple physical confrontation of the subject with the assailant, but always involves the mediation of what the subject “reads into this gaze.” In other words, Hippolytus’ gaze exemplifies perfectly Lacan’s thesis that the gaze I encounter “is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.”
It’s not the Other’s glance as such, but the way it “concerns me (me regarde), the way the subject sees himself affected by it as to his/her desire. Hyppolitus’ gaze is not the mere fact of his casting a glance at Phaedra, but the threat Phaedra sees in it from the position of her desire.
~excerpt from Jean Racine’s Phædre translated by Zizek in God Without the Sacred: The Book of Job, the First Critique of Ideology