Jacques Lacan: Psychanalyse (Télévision)

Filmed by Benoit Jacquot for French state television and broadcast in two parts, this is Lacan seated before the camera, speaking a script of his own in reply to questions set by Jacques-Alain Miller. He faces no studio audience; he looks out at whoever is watching and answers as though the whole country were on the couch. The spoken material was reworked for print as the text Television, later gathered in Autres ecrits and translated into English for the journal October and Norton.

It opens with Lacan stating that he always speaks the truth, though never the whole of it, since to say all of it is impossible. Commentators have read the broadcast as one of the most concentrated statements of his late teaching, and among the most resistant: the syntax knots, the puns carry argument, and sense is withheld as often as given.

For a clinician it offers something scarce: a filmed Lacan addressing a general public rather than his seminar, with his late positions on truth, the unconscious and jouissance set out in one sitting. It stands as a primary document to place beside the printed text.