Jacques LACAN (1901–1981). Autograph manuscript for televisi - Lot 194

Jacques LACAN (1901–1981). Autograph manuscript for television, [1973]; 9 pages, in-4 or oblong in-8. A highly polished and revised draft for the program *Psychanalyse*, on analytical discourse, sexuality, Freud, and repression. The program *Psychanalyse* was directed by Benoît Jacquot and broadcast by the ORTF on March 9 and 16, 1974; Lacan, in what would be his only appearance on French television, answers questions posed by his son-in-law and disciple Jacques-Alain Miller. The text of this program was published under the title *Télévision* by Éditions du Seuil in 1974; the manuscript corresponds to Chapter V (pp. 47–52) with a few variations and numerous cross-outs and corrections. Response to a question concerning repression regarding sex, by the family or society. “That is a question […], a question that might stem from your desire to know how to answer it yourself, given the occasion. Suppose: if it were posed to you by a voice rather than a person—a voice that can only be conceived as coming from the TV, a voice that does not exist—that is to say, it says nothing; yet, in the name of what, do I bring this answer into existence, which is an interpretation? To put it bluntly, you know I have an answer for everything, which is why you attribute the question to me: you’re relying on the proverb that one lends only to the rich. And rightly so. Who doesn’t know that it’s through analytical discourse that I’ve made my fortune? In that sense, I’m a self-made man. […] Freud did not say that repression stems from suppression—that, to use a metaphor, castration is due to the fact that Dad, seeing his little boy fondling his penis, threatens: “We’ll cut it off, for sure, if you do that again.” It’s only natural, however, that this should have occurred to him—to start from there for the experiment, to understand what defines it in analytical discourse. Let’s say that as he progressed, he leaned more toward the idea that repression came first. This is, on the whole, the shift in the second topic. The gluttony he attributes to the superego is structural—not an effect of civilization, but a malaise (symptom) within civilization. Thus, there is reason to revisit the test, based on the premise that it is repression that produces repression. Why shouldn’t the family—and society itself—be constructs built upon repression? Nothing less, but it could be because the unconscious ex-sists, drawing its motivation from structure—that is, from language. Freud does not rule out this solution at all; rather, it is to settle the matter that he fixates on the case of the “man among wolves,” a man who ends up faring rather poorly as a result. Yet it seems that this failure—the failure of the case—is but a minor setback compared to its success: that of establishing the reality of the facts. If this reality remains enigmatic, is it to be attributed to analytical discourse, which is itself an institution? There is no other recourse, then, than the project of science to overcome sexuality: sexology being, as yet, merely a project. A project, he insists, in which Freud had confidence. […] Yet analytical discourse itself makes a promise: to introduce something new. This—an enormous undertaking—in the field where the unconscious emerges, since its impasses, among other things certainly, but first and foremost, are revealed in love”… Etc. And Lacan concludes: “You have succumbed to leftism, but as far as I know, not to sex-leftism. For the latter pertains solely to analytical discourse, as it currently ex-sists. It ex-ists poorly, serving only to redouble the curse on sex. In this, it shows itself to fear that ethics which I situated within the realm of ‘good speech.’”