Top 58 Lacan's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.
Jacques Lacan
#3. The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
Jacques Lacan
#4. I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.
Jacques Lacan
#6. Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.
Jacques Lacan
#7. As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.
Jacques Lacan
#8. Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.
Jacques Lacan
#9. If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?
Judith Butler
#10. We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.
Jacques Lacan
#11. Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.
Jacques Lacan
#12. All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.
Jacques Lacan
#13. A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers to them most truly.
Jacques Lacan
#14. But what Freud showed us ... was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.
Jacques Lacan
#15. Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!
Gilles Deleuze
#16. 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
#17. Truth has the structure of a fiction.
Lacan
#18. Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension
Jacques Lacan
#19. The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
Jacques Lacan
#20. It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.
Jacques Lacan
#21. The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.
Jacques Lacan
#22. Hence, you are infinitely more than you imagine, subjects [or underlings] of gadgets and instruments of all kinds - ranging from the microscope, to radio and television - that will become elements of your being.
Lacan Jacques M.
#23. Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.
Jacques Lacan
#24. Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.
Camille Paglia
#25. What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?
Jacques Lacan
#26. The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.
Jacques Lacan
#28. The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.
Jacques Lacan
#29. My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.
Jacques Lacan
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss ... with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo
Jacques Lacan
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.
Jacques Lacan
#38. What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
Jacques Lacan
#39. 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
#40. There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you
Jacques Lacan
#41. 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
#42. Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.
Jacques Lacan
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.
Jacques Lacan
#47. 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
#48. The unconscious is structured like a language.
Jacques Lacan
#49. The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.
Jacques Lacan
#50. When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.
Jacques Lacan
#51. 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
#52. I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.
Jacques Lacan
#53. If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
Jacques Lacan
#54. (The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction 'love thy neighbour as thyself' must be ironic because people hate themselves.)
Adam Phillips
#55. Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
Jacques Lacan
#56. As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.
Slavoj Zizek
#57. The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.
Jacques Lacan
#58. The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
Jacques Lacan
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