J. Lacan Quotes

#1. The unconscious is structured like a language.

Jacques Lacan

#2. From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire (Seminar 7, 319)

Jacques Lacan

#3. It is only through the radical defile of speech that we fall into the illusion that language is a register of conscious construction

Lacan Jacques

#4. The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

Jacques Lacan

#5. The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.

Jacques Lacan

#6. The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.

Jacques Lacan

#7. As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.

Slavoj Zizek

#8. In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

Alain Badiou

#9. Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

Jacques Lacan

#10. (The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction 'love thy neighbour as thyself' must be ironic because people hate themselves.)

Adam Phillips

#11. If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.

Jacques Lacan

#12. I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.

Jacques Lacan

#13. In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

Jacques Lacan

#14. When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.

Jacques Lacan

#15. The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.

Jacques Lacan

#16. When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had "capitalism" as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.

Roger Scruton

#17. Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

Jacques Lacan

#18. For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

Jacques Lacan

#19. The I is always in the field of the Other.

Jacques Lacan

#20. Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

Jacques Lacan

#21. I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

Jacques Lacan

#22. Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

Jacques Lacan

#23. A geometry implies the heterogeneity of locus, namely that there is a locus of the Other. Regarding this locus of the Other, of one sex as Other, as absolute Other, what does the most recent development in topology allow us to posit?

Jacques Lacan

#24. There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you

Jacques Lacan

#25. Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see truth rise spontaneously.

Jacques Lacan

#26. What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

Jacques Lacan

#27. I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

Jacques Lacan

#28. For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.

Slavoj Zizek

#29. by Baudelaire! things are pretty hot!

Jacques Lacan

#30. But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.

Jacques Lacan