Two Mesmerizing Videos

I’ve been trying to get my hands on the only official video recording of Lacan speaking ever since seeing clips of it in the recent documentary on Slavoj Zizek. After a long time trolling around YouTube, I found a link to the online video archive Ubuweb, which has the entire recording freely available (albeit without subtitles). The recording is a television broadcast from 1973 of Lacan responding to questions posed by his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, and it completely changed the way I read him. I’ve heard a lot, of course, about Lacan’s infamously deft and difficult verbal style, riddled as it was with wordplay, irony, obscure references to pre-Socratic philosophers and topology, and psychoanalytic neologisms. But this style really needs to be seen directly to be fully appreciated—something is lost in the written transcription through which most of his ideas come down to us. The aim of the broadcast seems to be to provide a lay public with a basic introduction to his ideas, but this is no Psychoanalysis 101. Lacan speaks slowly at times, with long pauses for thought, and then he will suddenly burst out and gesture wildly with his arms. He frequently seems exasperated (with himself? his audience? the idea of being on TV?) and at one point he even starts to shout at the camera. Even though I’m missing a lot of what he says (I think you need to be a native French speaker to pick up on all of his jokes and witticisms), he is completely mesmerizing. Zizek criticizes Lacan for the eccentricity and flamboyancy of his style, saying that he “tries to forget it” while listening for the ideas underneath. Zizek calls himself an “Enlightenment thinker” in his desire for clarity, and has indeed become very famous for his ability to translate Lacan into a more accessible and less frightening language. I don’t think, however, that we can separate Lacan’s style from his ideas so easily. Deeply aware of his position as the sujet-supposé-savoir, Lacan seems to want to destabilize through pure excess his own authority and his own knowledge, to insert a degree of madness into the discourse of the university.

Jacques Lacan - Télévision (1973)

Oh, wait…who is that leathery old guy tricking out Ubuweb’s homepage? That’s Samuel Beckett, man! I did a search for Beckett and was delighted to find the first film version of one of his best short plays, Not I, also from 1973. This play sits very well with Lacan, along, I think, with much of Beckett’s work. The crux of the play is the intersection of “self” and Other—the play’s sole voice is continually tormented by the inability to determine if it, or a mysterious “she,” has been the victim of a tragedy. Along with many of Beckett’s plays, repetition is crucial in Not I in the form of the symptom. Language seems to be slowly cut away from its human moorings. You’ll see what I mean.


Samuel Beckett - Not I (1973)

UPDATE: Ubuweb also has Alan Schneider's version of Film (1966), Beckett's only screenplay, on this same page. It's silent black and white, starring Buster Keaton as a man who locks himself in a room with a dog, cat, parrot, and goldfish. I did some quick research and learned that Deleuze thought this was the "greatest Irish film." I also found a link to an audio recording of a symposium on the film hosted by Jean-Michel Rabaté (a sort of idol in this household).