Télévision (book)

Télévision
French title	Télévision
English title	Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment
Year	1974
Text type	Televised dialogue / theoretical text
Mode of delivery	Televised interview (later published in written form)
First presentation	Broadcast on French national television (ORTF), 1973
First publication	Éditions du Seuil, Paris (1974)
Collected in	Standalone publication; later included in collections of shorter texts
Text status	Authorial text (edited transcription of televised dialogue)
Original language	French
Psychoanalytic content
Key concepts	Discourse • Truth • Jouissance • The Real • Unconscious • Science • Subject
Themes	Psychoanalysis and science; discourse and truth; mass media and communication; jouissance and the real; critique of psychology and ideology
Freud references	Beyond the Pleasure Principle • The Ego and the Id • Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Related seminars	Seminar XVII • Seminar XX
Theoretical context
Period	Late teaching
Register	Real / Symbolic

Télévision is a late theoretical work by Jacques Lacan, originally broadcast on French national television in 1973 and published in written form in 1974. The text consists of a filmed dialogue in which Lacan responds to a series of questions concerning psychoanalysis, science, language, truth, and the status of the subject. It occupies a distinctive place within Lacan’s corpus as one of the most accessible yet conceptually dense presentations of his mature teaching.

Unlike Lacan’s seminars, which were delivered over an academic year to a largely specialized audience, Télévision addresses a broader public through the medium of mass communication. Nevertheless, the work does not simplify Lacan’s theoretical positions. On the contrary, it condenses central themes of his late thought—particularly the relation between psychoanalysis and science, the function of discourse, the nature of truth, the real and jouissance, and the status of the unconscious—into a compact and often aphoristic form.

The text is widely regarded as a key document of Lacan’s final period. It synthesizes concepts developed in the seminars of the late 1960s and early 1970s while staging, through its televisual format, a critical reflection on communication, knowledge, and the effects of discourse. Télévision thus functions simultaneously as an exposition of Lacanian theory and as a performative demonstration of its claims about language, address, and misrecognition.

Historical and Institutional Context

Broadcast and Publication

Télévision originated as a televised interview conducted in 1973 for the French public broadcasting service (ORTF). The broadcast was subsequently transcribed, edited, and published the following year as a standalone text by Éditions du Seuil. The decision to disseminate Lacan’s work through television was unusual within the psychoanalytic field, which traditionally privileged closed institutional settings such as seminars, training institutes, and specialized journals.

The early 1970s were marked by intense debate in France concerning science, ideology, language, and subjectivity, particularly in the wake of structuralism and its critiques. Lacan’s appearance on television must be understood against this backdrop, as well as within a broader context of public intellectual engagement by figures associated with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory.

Lacan’s Position in the Psychoanalytic Field

At the time of Télévision, Lacan occupied a singular and controversial position within international psychoanalysis. Following his break with the International Psychoanalytical Association in the 1960s and the founding of the École freudienne de Paris, Lacan had established an independent institutional framework for the transmission of psychoanalysis. By the early 1970s, he was widely recognized as a major theoretical innovator, yet remained sharply critical of what he regarded as the psychologization and scientism of mainstream analytic practice.

Télévision reflects this position. Throughout the text, Lacan reiterates his insistence on the irreducibility of psychoanalysis to psychology or the human sciences and emphasizes its specific relation to language and the real. His remarks are directed not only toward analysts but also toward philosophers, scientists, and a broader intellectual public, situating psychoanalysis as a discourse with a distinctive epistemological status.

Relation to the Late Seminars

The conceptual framework of Télévision is closely aligned with Lacan’s seminars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly those concerned with discourse, jouissance, and the real. Themes developed in seminars such as L’envers de la psychanalyse (1969–1970) and Encore (1972–1973) reappear in condensed form, often without extensive elaboration.

Rather than introducing new theoretical constructs, Télévision functions as a point of articulation and clarification within Lacan’s late teaching. Its significance lies in the way it re-presents established concepts in a new discursive setting, foregrounding the problem of address and the effects of mass media on meaning and truth.

Structure and Form of the Text

Dialogical Format

Télévision is structured as a dialogue, consisting of a series of questions posed to Lacan and his responses. The interlocutors are not presented as theoretical equals but serve primarily to prompt Lacan’s interventions. This format echoes the Socratic dialogue while also reflecting the conventions of televised interviews.

The dialogical structure allows Lacan to articulate his positions in short, often provocative statements rather than extended theoretical arguments. This stylistic economy contributes to the density of the text, as key concepts are invoked with minimal exposition and presuppose familiarity with Lacanian terminology.

Address, Audience, and Medium

A defining feature of Télévision is its explicit engagement with the conditions of address. Lacan repeatedly draws attention to the fact that he is speaking on television, to an audience whose presence is mediated rather than immediate. This awareness informs his remarks on communication, misunderstanding, and the circulation of discourse.

Television functions not merely as a neutral medium but as an object of theoretical reflection. Lacan exploits the setting to demonstrate how messages are transformed by their mode of transmission and how truth is displaced within mass communication. The text thus stages, at the level of form, the very problems it thematizes at the level of theory.

Television as Object of Critique

In Télévision, the medium itself becomes an implicit object of critique. Lacan’s interventions resist the expectations of clarity, pedagogy, and transparency commonly associated with televised discourse. By refusing to simplify his language or adapt fully to the conventions of broadcast communication, Lacan underscores his claim that psychoanalytic truth is not reducible to information or explanation.

This tension between medium and message is central to the text’s enduring interest. Télévision exemplifies Lacan’s insistence that discourse always exceeds its intended effects and that the subject is implicated in language in ways that cannot be mastered or fully communicated.

Major Theoretical Themes

Psychoanalysis and Science

A central concern of Télévision is the relation between psychoanalysis and science. Lacan rejects attempts to assimilate psychoanalysis to the empirical or experimental sciences, arguing that such efforts misconstrue its object. For Lacan, psychoanalysis does not operate on observable behaviors or measurable phenomena but on the effects of language and the unconscious on the speaking subject.

Lacan nevertheless insists that psychoanalysis is not opposed to science in a simple or reactionary sense. Rather, it emerges historically from the same epistemic rupture inaugurated by modern science, insofar as both are founded on a rejection of intuitive or phenomenological accounts of truth. Psychoanalysis, however, diverges from science in that it takes as its object what science necessarily forecloses: the subject as divided by language and implicated in jouissance.

This position leads Lacan to criticize forms of psychology and psychiatry that model themselves on scientific objectivity while ignoring the structural role of the unconscious. In Télévision, such critiques are articulated tersely and polemically, underscoring Lacan’s view that the scientific aspiration to mastery is incompatible with analytic practice.

Discourse and Truth

The problem of truth occupies a prominent place in Télévision. Lacan reiterates his well-known thesis that truth cannot be fully stated and that it is structurally linked to deception, misrecognition, and half-saying (mi-dire). Truth, in the psychoanalytic sense, does not correspond to factual accuracy or coherence but emerges through the effects of speech and the displacement of meaning within discourse.

In this context, Lacan distinguishes psychoanalytic discourse from pedagogical or informational forms of communication. The analyst does not transmit knowledge in the conventional sense but intervenes in the analysand’s discourse so as to produce effects of truth. Télévision dramatizes this distinction by presenting Lacan’s statements in a public forum while simultaneously resisting their stabilization into doctrine or explanation.

The Unconscious and Language

Consistent with Lacan’s long-standing reformulation of Freud, Télévision affirms the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language. The unconscious is not a reservoir of images or instincts but a network of signifiers whose effects manifest in slips, symptoms, and formations of compromise.

Lacan emphasizes that the unconscious speaks, but not in a manner that guarantees understanding. Communication is inherently marked by ambiguity, equivocation, and failure. In Télévision, this claim is reinforced by the medium itself, as televised speech is subject to truncation, mediation, and misinterpretation. The text thus situates the unconscious not behind language but within its very operation.

Jouissance and the Real

One of the defining features of Lacan’s late teaching, and of Télévision in particular, is the emphasis on jouissance and the real. Lacan contrasts jouissance with pleasure, stressing its excessive and often painful character. Jouissance names a mode of satisfaction that escapes symbolic regulation and resists integration into meaning.

The real, in this framework, is not reality as empirically given but what remains impossible to symbolize fully. In Télévision, Lacan repeatedly invokes the real as that which disrupts discourse and exposes the limits of knowledge. Psychoanalysis, he argues, does not aim to eliminate the real but to situate the subject’s relation to it.

The Subject of the Unconscious

The subject that emerges in Télévision is neither a conscious agent nor a psychological ego. Lacan insists on the division of the subject by language, emphasizing that the speaking being (parlêtre) is constituted through signifiers that precede and exceed it. This divided subject is responsible for its position in discourse, even though it cannot fully master the determinants of its speech.

Lacan’s remarks underscore the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis, insofar as analysis confronts the subject with its implication in what it says and does. Télévision thus reiterates a central Lacanian claim: that psychoanalysis concerns not adaptation or normalization but the subject’s relation to truth and jouissance.

Critique of Psychology, Philosophy, and Ideology

Throughout Télévision, Lacan directs pointed critiques at psychology, certain strands of philosophy, and ideological discourse. Psychology is faulted for reducing the subject to behavior or cognition, thereby evacuating the dimension of the unconscious. Philosophy is criticized insofar as it seeks foundational guarantees of meaning or truth, which Lacan regards as illusory.

Ideology, in Lacan’s account, operates through discourse by masking the real and offering imaginary solutions to structural impasses. Télévision positions psychoanalysis as uniquely capable of interrogating these operations, precisely because it does not promise reconciliation or wholeness.

Relation to Lacan’s Late Teaching

Télévision is closely integrated into the trajectory of Lacan’s late teaching, particularly his work on discourse, jouissance, and the real. The text presupposes developments introduced in the late 1960s, including the formalization of discourse and the increasing emphasis on what resists symbolization.

While Télévision does not introduce new mathemes or topological figures, it reflects a shift in Lacan’s mode of address. The condensation and sharpness of its formulations correspond to Lacan’s growing insistence on the limits of explanation and the necessity of formal rigor. In this sense, the text exemplifies the movement in Lacan’s work away from structuralist exposition toward a more radical confrontation with the real.

At the same time, Télévision maintains continuity with Lacan’s earlier insistence on language as constitutive of subjectivity. Its originality lies less in theoretical innovation than in its strategic re-presentation of established concepts within a new discursive and institutional context. The text thus occupies a distinctive place in Lacan’s intellectual trajectory, bridging the seminar room and the public sphere.

Reception and Influence

Contemporary Reception

Upon its publication in 1974, Télévision elicited mixed responses within psychoanalytic and intellectual circles. Some readers welcomed the text as a rare instance of Lacan addressing a non-specialist audience and regarded it as an unusually direct articulation of his late theoretical positions. Others criticized its density and elliptical style, arguing that the televisual format did little to clarify Lacan’s already demanding conceptual vocabulary.

Within Lacanian institutions, Télévision was generally read as a strategic intervention rather than a pedagogical text. Its importance was understood less in terms of accessibility than in its performative demonstration of Lacan’s claims about discourse, misunderstanding, and the limits of communication. Analysts familiar with Lacan’s seminars tended to approach the text as a condensed restatement of positions already developed elsewhere, rather than as a self-contained introduction.

Influence on Lacanian Theory and Practice

Télévision has exerted a sustained influence on Lacanian theory, particularly in discussions of discourse, the public status of psychoanalysis, and the relation between analysis and contemporary media. Its reflections on science and truth have been cited in debates concerning the epistemological specificity of psychoanalysis and its resistance to both positivism and hermeneutics.

Clinically, the text has been invoked in relation to the ethics of analytic practice, especially Lacan’s insistence that psychoanalysis does not aim at adaptation, well-being, or normalization. By foregrounding the irreducibility of jouissance and the real, Télévision reinforces a conception of analysis oriented toward the subject’s confrontation with what cannot be resolved through meaning.

Broader Intellectual Impact

Beyond the psychoanalytic field, Télévision has been taken up in discussions of media theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism. Lacan’s engagement with television as a medium has been read as an early and influential reflection on mass communication, mediation, and the transformation of discourse in modern societies. In this context, the text is often cited alongside Lacan’s work on discourse and ideology, particularly in analyses of how subjects are positioned by contemporary forms of communication.

Editions and Translations

French Edition

The original French text of Télévision was published in 1974 by Éditions du Seuil, following its broadcast on French television in 1973. This edition remains the primary reference for scholarly citation and has been reprinted in various collections of Lacan’s shorter works.

English Translation

An English translation appeared under the title Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. The translation introduced the text to an Anglophone readership and contributed significantly to its international reception.

Editorial commentary accompanying the English edition situates Télévision within Lacan’s late teaching and provides contextual guidance for readers unfamiliar with the institutional and theoretical background of French psychoanalysis.

See Also / Related Entries

• Encore (Seminar XX)
• The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XVII)
• Discourse (Lacan)
• Jouissance
• The Real (psychoanalysis)
• Unconscious structured like a language
• École freudienne de Paris