Charismatic Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan Gives Public Lecture (1972)

The footage above is from an extreme­ly rare – and unex­pect­ed­ly enter­tain­ing – video of the philoso­pher and psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), giv­ing a lec­ture at The Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain in 1972. The film is notable for a cou­ple of rea­sons:

1. In France, Lacan’s rock star sta­tus owed much to his pop­u­lar pub­lic sem­i­nars. The charis­mat­ic icon­o­clast had been giv­ing free pub­lic lec­tures for decades, and those lec­tures were usu­al­ly packed with stu­dents, col­leagues, skep­tics, young rad­i­cals … and fans. The video gives you an idea of what the fuss was all about. Even at 70, Lacan still owns the room, and he has the pres­ence of a stage actor, com­plete with dra­mat­ic paus­es, iron­ic self-reflec­tion, and pitch-per­fect storms of emo­tion (see minute 15:07).

2. At minute 21:37, a polit­i­cal­ly inspired heck­ler tries to ambush him. It’s a moment right out of a com­e­dy show, if the com­e­dy show were chic and grainy and edit­ed by Jean-Luc God­dard. Note the grace with which Lacan neu­tral­izes the poor guy, lights his cig­ar and then con­cludes the lec­ture, even though the fall­out from their encounter is still stuck in his hair.

Lacan’s ideas have fall­en a bit out of fash­ion in the past two decades, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the U.S., where psy­cho­analy­sis has been nudged out of the spot­light by neu­ro­science and post-struc­tural­ism has lost ground to post-colo­nial stud­ies. But Lacan still has his fans, notably the “Elvis of Phi­los­o­phy,” Slavoj Zizek, who dom­i­nates YouTube the way his pre­de­ces­sor once did salons.

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Vari­ety, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.