Jacques Lacan Quotes

Quotes about:

• All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

  Jacques Lacan

  Mirrors, World, This World

  127 Copy quote

• Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

  Jacques Lacan

  Mean, Giving, Want

  146 Copy quote

• The I is always in the field of the Other.

  Jacques Lacan

  Fields

  97 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, My Thoughts

  86 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Way, Impossible

  "The Truth Was Always Revolutionary": Luc Rioual on Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language", logger.believermag.com. August 11, 2017.

  112 Copy quote

• The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

  Jacques Lacan

  Reason, Poetry Is

  82 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Lacan

  Giving, Doe, Matter

  124 Copy quote

• ...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

  Jacques Lacan

  Lying, Desire, Rooms

  Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller (1988). “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955”, p.223, CUP Archive

  115 Copy quote

• The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.

  Jacques Lacan

  Real

  78 Copy quote

• The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

  Jacques Lacan

  Discourse, Unconscious

  67 Copy quote

• The unconscious is structured like a language.

  Jacques Lacan

  Language, Unconscious

  "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" (1957)

  57 Copy quote

• 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

  Relation, Position

  85 Copy quote

• The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

  Jacques Lacan

  Desire, Guilty, Given

  Jacques Lacan (2013). “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan”, p.321, Routledge

  81 Copy quote

• The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.

  Jacques Lacan

  Eye, Evil, Movement

  Jacques Lacan (2004). “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”, p.164, Karnac Books

  70 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Perfect, Becoming

  Jacques Lacan, Alan Sheridan (1980). “Écrits: a selection”

  59 Copy quote

• Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension

  Jacques Lacan

  Real, Desire, Dimensions

  53 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Doe, Obsession

  58 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Lacan

  Morning, Baltimore, Early Morning

  58 Copy quote

• 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

  Way, Symbolic, Destroyed

  Jacques Lacan (2004). “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”, p.75, Karnac Books

  50 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Lacan

  Purity, Defects, Universe

  38 Copy quote

• What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?

  Jacques Lacan

  Cards, Tables, Gestures

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Firsts, Language

  61 Copy quote

• The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

  Jacques Lacan

  Lasts, Term, Sentences

  Jacques Lacan, Alan Sheridan (1980). “Écrits: a selection”

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Want, Symptoms

  10 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Lacan

  Absence, Units, Symbols

  21 Copy quote

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