Lacan Quotes

• ...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

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• 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”

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• French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.

  Noam Chomsky

  Stars, Self, Intellectual

  Noam Chomsky, Jean Bricmont, Julie Franck (2010). “Chomsky Notebook”, p.72, Columbia University Press

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

  Slavoj Žižek

  Class, Enemy, Add

  YouTube Channel "planetjanet"/"Slavoj Žižek interview on NiteBeat", www.youtube.com. June 25, 2008.

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• 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

  Heterosexuality Is, Issues, Female

  Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory Judith Butler (2002). “Gender Trouble: Tenth Anniversary Edition”, p.63, Routledge

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• Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

  Camille Paglia

  Self, Perfect, Personality

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• 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

  Philosophy, Views, Philosopher

  Alain Badiou (2015). “Theoretical Writings”, p.113, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.

  Camille Paglia

  Recovery, Europe, Ideas

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• 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

  Art, Thinking, Sight

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.210, Vintage

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