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194 - Jacques LACAN (1901–1981). Autograph manuscript for a televi…
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Estimate €5,000 - €6,000
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Jacques LACAN (1901–1981). Autograph manuscript for a television programme, [1973]; 9 pages, in-4 or oblong in-8. A highly polished and corrected draft for the programme *Psychanalyse*, on analytical discourse, sexuality, Freud and repression. The programme *Psychanalyse* was directed by Benoît Jacquot and broadcast by the ORTF on 9 and 16 March 1974; Lacan, in what was to be his only appearance on French television, answered questions posed by his son-in-law and disciple Jacques-Alain Miller. The text of this programme 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 crossings-out and corrections. Response to a question concerning repression relating to sex, whether by the family or society. ‘That is a question […], a question which might stem from your desire to know how to answer it yourself, when the occasion arises. Put it this way: if it were put to you by a voice rather than a person – a voice that can only be conceived as coming from the telly, a voice that does not ex-sist, and yet, in the name of what, do I bring this answer—which is an interpretation—into existence? To put it bluntly, you know I have an answer for everything, and so you attribute the question to me: you rely on the proverb that one lends only to the rich. And rightly so. Who does not know that it is through analytical discourse that I have made my fortune? In what sense am I a self-made man? […] Freud did not say that repression stems from suppression – that, to put it figuratively, castration is due to the fact that Dad, seeing his little lad fiddling with his willy, threatens: ‘We’ll cut it off, for sure, if you do that again.’ It is only natural, however, that this should have occurred to him, to take this as his starting point for the experiment, to understand what defines it in analytical discourse. Let’s say that as he progressed, he leaned more towards the idea that repression came first. This is, broadly speaking, the shift in the second topic. The gluttony with which he characterises the superego is structural; it is not an effect of civilisation, but a malaise (symptom) within civilisation. Consequently, there is reason to revisit the concept of the ordeal, on the basis that it is repression that produces repression. Why should the family, or society itself, not be constructs built upon repression? Nothing less, but it could well be that the unconscious ex-sists, drawing its motivation from structure—that is, from language. Freud does so little to rule out this solution that it is precisely to settle the matter that he fixates on the case of the ‘man-among-wolves’, a man who finds himself rather in a sorry state as a result. Yet it seems that this failure—the failure of the case—is but a hair’s breadth away from 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 scientific project to overcome sexuality: sexology being, as yet, merely a project. A project in which, he insists, Freud had faith. […] Yet analytical discourse itself makes a promise: to introduce something new. This is a momentous thing in the field where the unconscious comes into being, 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 am aware, 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 in the ‘good saying’.”
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About the sale Letters and Autograph Manuscripts – Part I
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Auction time 10/13/2026 at 2:00 PM
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