Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment by Jacques Lacan New York:  W. W. Norton, 1990,  xxxi + 135 pp., $24.95

Television is in many ways an odd book that, I suspect, will fall between two audiences: those who are familiar with Lacan's work and those who are not. The problem is that, on one hand, there is nothing new here for the sophisticated student of Lacan, but, on the other, the book requires considerable familiarity with Lacanian thinking to be even remotely comprehensible.

Lacan's style here is, as always, difficult, elliptical, obscure. For the novice, reading Television would be like attempting to translate a cuneiform tablet where one knows the meaning of only a few symbols—and one would surely feel uncertain even of those; each symbol requiring hours of concentrated work to accurately decipher. To add to the sheer difficulty of reading Television, most of Lacan's major concepts—“le nom de pere,” “the mirror phase,” “the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary,”—are nowhere defined and are frequently encountered embedded in the most convoluted puns which would be difficult enough to comprehend in their original French, let alone in translation.

Not only are these stylistic difficulties confined to the text of the main section—the television interview that gives its name to the book—but they are also frequently present in the series of letters and documents that comprise the second half of the volume. So obscure is the text that Jacques-Alain Miller, a former member of the Ecole Freudienne, offers a long preface attempting to guide the reading of Lacan's discourse: a preface which, tragically, is as incomprehensible as the text it presumes to elucidate!

Still, there is a difference between obscurity and obscurantism. Despite recent charges that behind the often impenetrable acrobatics of Lacan's discourse there is nothing but a hollow void, it is necessary that we come to terms with what Lacan has referred to as his “return to Freud.” What does this mean? In what sense does he