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My Lacan is Burning: Revisiting 'Television'
Catherine Liu, Charles Shepherdson, Jean-Michel Rabaté
[Multimedia content blocked]
Listen to a 103 minute recording, or download the file
Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Slought Foundation
Conversations in Theory Series
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Slought Foundation, an organization rethinking contemporary arts, presents "My Lacan is Burning: Revisiting 'Television'" on Wednesday, June 02, 2004 from 6:30-8:30pm. In 1972 Jacques-Alain Miller, then an analyst in training, approached French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to request a television interview. "I wanted Lacan, just once, to speak to the common man," said Miller at the New York City 1987 colloquium organized around that interview and called "Jacques Lacan: Television." The two-hour program, which took the form of an interview and discourse, aired in 1973 on the French government TV network O.R.T.F. under the title, Psychoanalysis. In a style that is typical of Lacan’s own playful, impassioned, and evasive seminar style, we have invited theorists Catherine Liu and Charles Shepherdson to perform this discourse live and in English, alongside a projection of the original broadcast. A public discussion, introduced and moderated by Lacanian theorist Jean-Michel Rabaté, Slought Foundation Senior Curator and Editor of the new Cambridge Guide to Lacan (2003), will follow the performance.
"When Lacan says on Television, 'I always tell the truth...' he means it. He's making this pronouncement on TV and insofar as any talking head, including Lacan's, can embody a voice, he speaks for television itself... Television wants to believe that it tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth... But Television tries to account for the difficulty of the truth of the Real by producing its own built in self-critique module in the form of cynicism. In this way, it tries to cover its anxiety, which is, as Lacan has taught us, precisely the one affect which does not deceive." -- Catherine Liu, from Lacanian Ink #3
Catherine Liu's February 2002 Slought Foundation lecture, "To Catch a Falling Star: Lacan Meets Warhol," engaging the original broadcast and recording, is available in audio format online at: Slought.org/content/11057/
Catherine Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota. She has published articles on psychoanalytic theory, issues in feminist criticism and French literature of the ancien régime, Walter Benjamin, and Conspiracy Theory. She has curated exhibitions of contemporary art in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as having worked as a regular reviewer for Artforum and Flash Art. In 1992, she edited a special issue of Lusitania, on issues of contemporary theory and cultural production called The Abject, America. Her book, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, addresses the genealogy of the machine and technologies of difference. She also translated Gérard Pommier’s Erotic Anger: A User’s Manual.
Charles Shepherdson is Professor of English, SUNY Albany and Aristotelian Chair in the Liberal Arts, Saint Thomas Aquinas College. He
writes on contemporary continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Vital Signs: Nature, Culture and Psychoanalysis (Routledge), and The Epoch of the Body (Stanford), as well as a collection published in Belgrade by Zenske Studie, The Ethics of Female Love. His work has had support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently working on a book on tragedy, as well as a book on Lacan and Philosophy.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992, has authored or edited twenty books on Modernism, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Lacan, Derrida, psychoanalysis and literary theory. He is a Senior Curator at Slought.
Organized by
Aaron Levy
Media files on the Slought.org website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
MLA Style:
Catherine Liu, et al. "My Lacan is Burning: Revisiting 'Television'." Slought Foundation Online Content. [02 June 2004;
Accessed 18 March 2010]. <http://slought.org/content/11175/>.
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