Lacan Quotes

“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955

“Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the ‘Other’ — as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed towards this Other, in the shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others — our parents, for instance — unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations — the whole field of the ‘Other’ — which generate it.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian 'il n'y a pas de rapport ...': if, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no 'meta-language' enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although—or, rather, because—these two levels are inextricably intertwined.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

“If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“We see not because everything is visible, but because something always defies the eye, persisting beyond the remit of mere representation. This something, which Pasolini endeavors to situate at the heart of filmmaking, is preceisely 'that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consicousness' (Lacan, 1998).”
― Fabio Vighi, Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious

“What Althusser does… is to rethink the concept of ideology in terms of Lacan’s ‘imaginary’. For the relation of an individual subject to society as a whole in Althusser’s theory is rather like the relation of the small child to his or her mirror-image in Lacan’s. In both cases, the human subject is supplied with a satisfyingly unified image of selfhood by identifying with an object which reflects this image back to it in a closed, narcissistic circle. In both cases, too, this image involves a misrecognition, since it idealizes the subject’s real situation. The child is not actually as integrated as its image in the mirror suggests; I am not actually the coherent, autonomous, self generating subject I know myself to be in the ideological sphere, but the ‘decentred’ function of several social determinants. Duly enthralled by the image of myself I receive, I subject myself to it; and it is through this ‘subjection’ that I become a subject.”
― Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

“Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.

Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.

Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'

These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...

Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.

This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland.”
― Dr. Chester Elijah Branch, Lecture Notes

“L'unica cosa di cui si possa essere colpevoli è di aver ceduto sul proprio desiderio”
― Jacques Lacan, Il seminario. Libro VII: L'etica della psicoanalisi

“The abject impulse is inalienably connected with the feminine, specifically the maternal. As it forms out of the undefined morass of relations, surfaces and currents that existed before the Oedipal or mirror-stage coordinated them, the subject seems built around a primal sense of loss. The developing sense of the limits of the body is focussed on those holes in it's surface through which the outside becomes inside and vice versa: the mouth, anus, genitals, even the invisibly porous surface of the skin. It was the mother's body that was most connected with these crossing-points, as it fed and cleaned the undefined infant body. The sense that boundaries and limits are forming around this permable flesh is interpreted then as the withdrawal or even loss, of intimacy with the body of the mother, firstly in the increasing distance of the practical hygiene operations it performs and secondly, more remotely, beyond that in it's archaic ur-form as the body through which the child entered into the world.”
― Nick Mansfield

“The other concept of truth in Lacan situates the truth, so to speak, in the midst of reality. Here, the discontinuities, ruptures, standstills, and crises of reality are places or points of its truth. The truth is not some impossible and lethal Beyond that can be reached only by transgressing the limits of the Symbolic and the Imaginary –Lacan comes to present it as something that speaks between the lines, detectable in changes of discursivity, in the disturbances, interruptions, and slips of the discourse...”
― Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two

“To suggest that we look to the past, to Freud and Lacan, in order to find a new ethical code may seem counterintuitive, but when capital reterritorializes the psyche into systems based on their compatibility with viral market shares of the mental health topographical map, it is hard to argue for an ever-forward, arc of history that always bends toward justice. This is where ethics must come into play.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“The positive fruit of the revelation of ignorance is nonknowledge, which is not a negation of knowledge but rather its most elaborate form.”
― Jacques Lacan, Variations on the Standard Treatment, Écrits

“One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance. Such were the deaths of Barthes and Lacan, I believe: the world has taken another direction since, in which these subtle figures would no longer have had any meaning. The death of Sartre, by contrast, left the world unchanged and seems an ineluctable, but insignifi cant event. Before dying, he was already to live in a world that was no longer his own.

So far as existence is concerned, as Ajar [Romain Gary] would say, it needs to be taken in charge by someone. No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition. Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion. The individual would have to be able to transform himself into the vestal, or the slave, of his identity, control all his circuits and all the circuits of the world which meet in his genes, nerves and thoughts. An unprecedented state of servitude. Who would wish to have salvation at such a price? It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms . Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Lo mejor que puede suceder al hombre son los destrozos de su vida", sentencia lacaniana cuya veracidad comprobé hasta las últimas consecuencias.”
― Gérard Haddad

“La atmósfera pronto se tornó irrespirable, y frente a la idiotez a gran escala mi desenfado puede alcanzar alturas insospechadas.”
― Gérard Haddad, Le jour où Lacan m'a adopté (Essai)

“Los períodos sombríos de existencia, ¿no son acaso aquellos en los cuales el deseo se agota?”
― Gérard Haddad, Le jour où Lacan m'a adopté (Essai)

“Saber aquello que el partenaire va a hacer no constituye una prueba de amor.”
― Gérard Haddad, Le jour où Lacan m'a adopté (Essai)

“Quizá la mayoría de los jóvenes judíos de mi generación eran más proclives a los encantos de la playa, la emoción de los primeros flirteos, y las partidas de póker. La ventaja de la neurosis, y de hecho tiene algunos beneficios, fue mantenerme distante de esta estéril ociosidad.”
― Gérard Haddad, Le jour où Lacan m'a adopté (Essai)

“Mi patriotismo era una conquista de la dignidad. Si ésta era ilusoria, ¿qué sentido tenía este patriotismo?”
― Gérard Haddad, Le jour où Lacan m'a adopté (Essai)

“All feelings of completeness are tragic.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“Antigone emerges as a figure of pure desire precisely because, with her words and actions, she incites in others this tenacious question: What does she want? She states what she wants from the outset, yet there is no one in the play who is not baffled at one point or another by this question: OK, she wants to bury Polyneices, but what does she actually want?”
― Alenka Zupančič, Let Them Rot: Antigone's Parallax

“At the core of Lacanian ethics if therefore the idea that the subject who steps into the real - the place of the lack in the Other - severes its ties to the symbolic order. Such a subject is no longer embarassed by its inability to adhere to the rules of social behavior but instead embraces - feels compelled to embrace - the destructive energies of the real. This subject is not interested in trying to solve its problem within the parameteres of the system but rather insists on changing the game entirely, on defying the very structuring principles of the system, which is why the act opens a gateway to what might, from the perspective of the established order, seem completely inconceivable (or even utterly insane).”
― Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

“Understandable, this all may be an illusion; yet my ambition remains steadfast - to be the most captivating mirage in the panorama.”
― Syed Buali Gillani

“At the core of Lacanian ethics is therefore the idea that the subject who steps into the real - the place of the lack in the Other - severes its ties to the symbolic order. Such a subject is no longer embarassed by its inability to adhere to the rules of social behavior but instead embraces - feels compelled to embrace - the destructive energies of the real. This subject is not interested in trying to solve its problem within the parameteres of the system but rather insists on changing the game entirely, on defying the very structuring principles of the system, which is why "the act" opens a gateway to what might, from the perspective of the established order, seem completely inconceivable (or even utterly insane).”
― Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

“We thus have three levels of antagonism: the Two are never two, the One is never one, the Nothing is never nothing. Sinthome—the signifier of the barred Other—registers the antagonism of the Two, their non-relationship. The object a registers the antagonism of the One, its inability to be one. $ registers the antagonism of Nothing, its inability to be the Void at peace with itself, to annul all struggles. The position of Wisdom is that the Void brings ultimate peace, a state in which all differences are obliterated; the position of dialectical materialism is that there is no peace even in the Void.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism