Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 21:11:17 -0800 (PST) From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: [postanarchism] Ball: "Prime Time Psychoanalysis" (pre-Newman Lacanian anarchism?) This essay, from 1987, finds one aspect of the Lacanian legacy as being the resurgence of anarchism since the Sixties, but doesn't cite who exactly this assertion is in reference to, obviously it is not Saul Newman (who by the way has a new book coming called "Unstable Universalities: Postmodernity and Radical Politics"), so who or what is it? *** Prime Time Psychoanalysis http://www2.rpa.net/~vsw/afterimage/ball.htm by Edward Ball Jacques Lacan died six years ago, leaving his renegade version of psychoanalysis to be debated by columns of followers in deconstructionist criticism, film theory, feminism and psychoanalysis proper. Throughout his 50-year career, Lacan cultivated an aura of personal mystique with the care of a diva. In contrast to Freud's even, statesmanlike style, the French analyst spoke and wrote in apocryphal tones, like some oracle of the unconscious. For this Lacan withstood endless criticism; meanwhile, his adherents multiplied. Thrown out of establishment psychoanalytic institutions, Lacan's star profile eventually cast a shadow over them. By the time his theory spilled over into liberal arts curricula during the '60s and '70s, Lacan's influence had reached far beyond that of any psychoanalyst since Freud himself. In 1972 Jacques-Alain Miller, then an analyst in training, approached Lacan to request a television interview. The idea of broadcasting Lacan into the living rooms of France must have seemed progressive to the post-1968 French intelligentsia (and strangely, to the government television bureaucrats who permitted it). "I wanted Lacan, just once, to speak to the common man," said Miller at the recent colloquium (April 9-10) in New York City organized around that interview and called "Jacques Lacan: Television." The two-hour program aired in 1973 on the French government TV network O.R.T.F. under the title, Psychoanalysis. Who knows how it was received; Lacan's onscreen pronouncements are as opaque as anything he wrote. Psychoanalysis has survived as the only document of Lacan on film, the only record of the once-notorious lecture style that the analyst showcased at his infamous seminars in Paris during the late '60s to early '70s. It is important to see intellectual icons like Lacan speak before an audience or on film. The specular event diminishes the preciousness of their writing. This, at any rate, was the greatest value of "Jacques Lacan: Television," which was organized by October magazine and the French psychoanalytic journal Ornicar?, and took place at Cooper Union, an art school in lower Manhattan. Psychoanalysis was dug out of the vaults for the meeting, subtitled, and screened with lavish introductory hype. About 100 Lacan specialists and fellow travelers showed up to watch. The black and white print broke a few times, the sound was lost and finally the showmanlike Lacan was left gesticulating silently to the rhythm of the subtitles beneath his chin. Nervous laughter filled the auditorium; spectators were here to see the intellectual hero no matter what. In the filmed interview, Lacan moves through his various poses: a teacher, an ironist, a demagogue, a new messiah of psychoanalysis. In the first minute, the neo-Freudian upbraids the offscreen interviewer Miller, who had wanted Lacan to simplify things for the camera: "Why should I use a different tone here than for my seminar? . . . I am speaking to those who are savvy, to the non-idiots, to the supposed analysts." Later, he muses with immoderate self-irony: "You know that I've got an answer to everything . . . Who doesn't know that it's with psychoanalysis that I've made it big. That makes me a self-made man." One imagines a viewer in Normandy dialing through the channels and coming upon Lacan's histrionics. What kind of television was this? In her remarks at the conference the following day, Yale comparative literature professor Shoshana Felman summarized the Psychoanalysis interview for Lacan: "You want to see me. I will give you a show. You want a reader's digest of my theory, I will give you reader's indigestion." Lacan has always been for insiders only. The sectarian quality of his thought was symbolized at the "Lacan: Television" gathering by the presence of his daughter, Judith Lacan Miller, who introduced the film and claimed never to have spoken previously at a meeting about her father. A peculiar nepotism could also be seen in the figure of Jacques-Alain Miller, the honored guest at the conference, who since Psychoanalysis has married Judith Lacan and who now alone controls the reproduction rights to Lacan's prized seminars. The day-long presentation of papers following the screening circled in the rarefied air of Lacanian terminology, yet if one accepted their remote probing, some of the presentations were excellent. One was delivered by a man who must be the only Lacanian from the Eastern bloc, Slavoj Zizek, a Yugoslavian critic now teaching in Paris, who admits with a smile to having just finished a book of "orthodox" Lacanian film theory on Hitchcock in his native tongue, Serbo-Croatian ("it was on the best-seller list"). Zizek cracked serious jokes about television cartoons and Stalinism as they relate to Lacan. In another paper embroidered with inside humor, Jeffrey Mehlman, a longtime translator of Lacan into English, sought to demonstrate how the ambitious Freudian was fearful of being shunted into the failing discipline of psychoanalysis and that "Lacanian psychoanalysis is an effort to achieve its own liberation," an argument corroborated by Lacan's lifelong posturing as a fugitive intellectual surrounded by enemies and fools. And in the most lucid presentation of the day, Shoshana Felman elegantly took apart the filmed interview: "Psychoanalysis is a trap for the spectator's gaze, a means for seeing Lacan as king. . . . Lacan is playing God onscreen." For those who could not see Lacan playing God for the camera at Cooper Union, a slightly shorter version of the interview can be found in October's Spring 1987 issue (#40), itself a translation of the 1974 book T?l?vision that Lacan produced out of the episode. Unfortunately, the antics of Jacques-Alain Miller cast a shadow over "Lacan: Television." The self-selected heir apparent to Lacan seems to have in mind to manage the interpretation of his dead father-in-law's thought. After interrupting speakers toward the end of the New York meeting, during his purported summary remarks, Miller grabbed the microphone and strode around the floor like a Freudian Phil Donahue, fielding questions from a disappearing audience. If Jacques-Alain Miller is the new oracle of Lacanian analysis, then perhaps there is a way of ignoring him. At the peak of the "Lacanian moment" of cultural criticism in the 1970s, when his writings infiltrated university classrooms, Lacan had rebuilt psychoanalysis into a revolutionizing discourse that fueled opposition philosophy: Marxism, anarchism, as well as feminism and deconstruction. The 1973 television interview was a failed effort to get the word out further. Today Lacan is still read, but he has been ghettoized by his own success in the academy. "Jacques Lacan: Television" was a reminder that Lacanian psychoanalysis has always done fine as marginalia, but it has no pull in ordinary society. As one speaker, John Rajchman, remarked: "The Enlightenment ideal held that philosophy is free only when it is public. Lacan could never become public." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Edward Ball was a New York City-based media critic. He is currently missing in action. ===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way." - Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
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