Télévision

1973 (75 pp.)- TELEVISION-1973, 1987 Lacan made his debut on television on two shows produced by Benoit JaC-�quot, under the title Psychoanalysis. He was questioned by J.-A. Miller who,�afterwards, wrote the transcription of the discussions to be published by the Editions du Seuil. As a foreword, Miller stated: "I asked the person who replied to you to sift what I heard of what he had said to me." Lacan an�swered, "He who interrogates me also knows how to read me." But there 238 DOSS I ER was a misunderstanding; Lacan did not respond to us. We had not asked our questions. He only addressed himself to us or he answered J.-A. Miller's questions. Such a complicity "between two" persons is characteristic of de�bates on television in France, where the interviewer's role is to highlight the interviewee while enhancing his own prestige via the interview. The false casualness of the questions hardly hid this relationship, particularly since they were asked in already coded terms. For example, in the question "Quid of psychic energy?" it is easy to perceive the jargon. In fact, the organization of the interview showed it: the jokes were meant for those who did not belong to the clan-the audience and the non- or anti-Lacanian psychoanalysts. It was a matter of responding to a variety of questions that had already been disqualified by the tone, the form, or the caricatured simplification of their content. - Lacan began with a statement that has become famous:[I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say It all. Saying it all is materially impossible: words fail. Yet it is through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the realjOne either agreed, captivated by the power of the word, or one already knew most of the theory as a result of having attcndcd the seminars. Then, almost all the problems were tackled: the doc�trinc, the psychoanalytic institution, the mental-health workers who "'were) taking all the burdens of the world's misery onto their shoulders" and who held it against the analyst, the family and society, style, etc. Some of his inventions were funny: the SAMCDA, societe d'assistance mutuelle contre Ie discours analytique (Society of mutual assistance against analytic discourse), was the nickname given to the International Association of Psychoanalysis. This conception of sainthood implied in the notion of "mutual assistance" has nothing to do with charity. The themes of L'Ethique de la psychanalyse (43), already reelaborated in La Logique dufantasme (65) and the Proposition de 1967 sur la passe (66), under the form of deserre, reappcarcd forcefully; was it under the form of the saint? "His business is not caritas. He acts as trash; his business being trashitas 'if decharite)." bb Fi�nally, we quote thc conclusion: "De ce qui perdure de perte pure a ce qui TIe parie que du pere au pire," which corresponds to the equation written in the a margin _ <t>'cc This is a real condensation of the Lacanian discourse. bb. The word, a neologism created by Lacan, combines dechet. trash, and charili, charity. As a verb it associates trash and the act of doing charity, or rather of not doing charily since the prefix de connotes negation or removal. cc. This sentence defies translation: it plays on perle. loss. perle pure. pure loss and also pure dross. the neologism perdure. from perdu. lost, and from durer, to last, parier. to bet. Ie pere, the father, and Ie pire. the worst. The meaning would be that the equation would correspond to the movement between that which is lost but lasts through pure dross. and the hand that draws only from Father to worse.