Quotes About Symbolic

Because of our ability to imagine an enjoyment that the symbolic order prohibits, the imaginary offers us a separate register of experience, distinct from the symbolic order.

Imaginary experience never actually breaks from the structure of the symbolic order. Our imaginary enjoyment remains a confined and policed enjoyment, an enjoyment relatively amenable to symbolic authority.

Here is perhaps the chief indication that we are in the midst of a society of enjoyment: even the attempt to restore prohibition follows the logic of the demand for enjoyment, albeit in the guise of opposing it. When we resurrect the father today, he doesn't appear in the form of the symbolic father, the barrier to enjoyment. Instead, he appears in a form consonant with the society of enjoyment.

Just as the word and its absence of enjoyment are central in the society of prohibition, the image and its illusion of present enjoyment are central in the society of enjoyment. This shift in primacy from the word to the image corresponds, in the terms of psychoanalysis, to a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary. This means, most obviously, that images have more of an effect on us today than words, that we are increasingly dealing with images rather than words.

there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything.

World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.

In Christianity, the number eight represented rebirth and re-creation. The octagon served as a visual reminder of the six days of God's creation of heaven and earth, the one day of Sabbath, and the eighth day, upon which Christians were "reborn" or "re-created" through baptism. Octagons had become a common shape for baptistries around the world.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.

he sacked Rome in 410, an event which shocked the Roman world much as 11 September 2001 shocked the United States, a huge, upsetting, symbolic blow to its self-confidence; but it was without other repercussions,

Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.

After the death of Franco himself in November 1975 removed the crucial symbolic impediment, this process was impelled by reformist Francoists who understood that dismantling dictatorial structures dating back to the civil war and 1940s was the price of continued prosperity in new economic times.

However, I have also argued for allegory's positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

The ability to transmit in symbolic forms and human patterns a representative portion of a culture is the great mark of the city: this is the condition for encouraging the fullest expression of human capacities and potentialities, even in the rural and primitive areas beyond.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of moral and symbolic- not an empirical- nature, it cannot be disproven.

In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value.

A generation has disappeared or changed direction. A backfire against theoretical radicalism – and one in which socialism has played its part. The symbolic murder of the intellectual class, not at all unlike the symbolic murder of the political class by the silent majorities.

Performance. Divestiture of humans and their freedom. Disqualification of humans in favor of automatism, a massive transfer of decision-making to computerized devices. A symbolic capitulation, a defeat of the will much more serious than any physical impairment. Sacrifizio dell'intelletto, della volunta, dell'immaginazione.

This is the true break, not a social fracture but a symbolic one: in the advent of an integral reality that absorbs all aspirations towards dreaming, surpassing or revolt. -The despair of having everything. -The despair of being nothing. -The despair of being everybody. -The despair of being nobody.

To analyse present-day systems in their catastrophic reality, to consider not only their failures and aporias but also the way in which they sometimes succeed only too well and get lost in the delusion of their own functioning, is to come face to face at every turn with the theorem or equation of the accursed share, and to find its indestructible symbolic power confirmed every time.

That everything exceptional is doomed to be destroyed derives from the symbolic rule that no player must be bigger than the game itself.

The Oscars have become such a big deal these days that it's just used as adjective.

The fall of humanity was the fall from the actual to the symbolic. Language abstracts us from the real world; keeping us from direct, intuitive perception. Words, like the ego, are merely guides. Don't mistake them for the real thing. Pull aside the filthy curtains of the social. Language makes an enigma of simple existence; it obscures the true nature of reality and of your self.