Jacques Lacan: Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (1974/1990)

“Here, Lacan points to the dependence of thought and the unconscious on the structure of language. He pits this relation against the notion of thought as grounded in a physical anatomy imagined as an objectified and highly assumptive unity of functions, a singular body. Such a singularity of subjectivity is predicated upon the chain of intersubjectivity, the bonds of civilization, in which it aquires definition. Thus Lacan recognizes that the Aristotelian notion of the subject as object supplies, at the level of the intersubjective, the means of its radical decentering, viz. :

“the ex-sistence [a holding outside] of one more subject for the soul.”

In fact, the physical symptoms of the hysteric, the invasion and disturbance of the body by obsessive thoughts, how to behave, what to say, testifies to the fact that the only relation thought has to the soul-body is one of a differentiating projective ex-sistence.

Lacan argues that the concept of the subject as a composite of thought and soul emerges from efforts to conform thought to the world, for which, under the sway of the aforementioned social bonds, the soul is held responsible. Lacan argues that the object of this responsiblity which passes for “reality” is, in fact, a fantasy, a “grimace of the real”, which simply serves an instinctual purpose: the survivalist perpetuation of thought.”

First part of the book: Television
Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson

Second part of the book: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment
Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
Edited by Joan Copjec

French edition by Les Editions du Seuil, 1974
Publisher W W Norton, New York/London, 1990
ISBN 0393024962
135 pages

Video of the televised lecture the book is based on
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PDF (updated on 2012-10-6)
See also special issue of October journal, 1987.