Quotes About Lacan

The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction 'love thy neighbour as thyself' must be ironic because people hate themselves.)

Lacan savait que le théâtre est un réservoir capital quand il s'agit de comprendre le mécanisme qui transforme le réel en représentation et le désir en images.

For Lacan, desire is what simultaneously defines us as human subjects and what prevents us from ever being whole or complete. To desire something, after all, is to lack something.

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.

Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we are saying. In this second level of speaking there are repeating words, phrases, and even sounds that function as magnets of unconscious meaning, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas. He called such markers in speech 'signifiers.

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?

In Lacan's view, it is not just dreams but conscious subjective experience in general that is organized into distracting little stories, and it is the folly of ego psychology and object relations theories to have bought into the disguises offered by secondary elaboration, to have taken the illusory stories as real, rather than covers for an underlying sense of loss, absence, castration.

This fixation of desire upon beauty in fantasy leads to a kind of living death or, as Lacan calls it, a "zone of encroachment of death upon life" (p. 331/285). This is perhaps "the place of desire insofar as it is a desire for nothing

This is an obsessive configuration insofar as the obsessive's desire is always for something impossible: to attain an unattainable status (e.g., perfection, omniscience, or immortality), to complete an uncompletable project, or to possess what he cannot possess. In saying that the obsessive is characterized by an impossible desire, Lacan goes so far as to add that his desire is for impossibility itself.

Fantasy provides the pleasure peculiar to desire. -Lacan, Ecrits, 773

Desire is a remedy for anxiety," as Lacan says in Seminar VIII, 430).

The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.

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'.

This object is what Lacan calls the objet petit a. The objet a constitutes the subject as desiring; it provides the lure that acts as an engine for the desire of the subject and also directs that desire in its circuit. In fact, Lacan notes repeatedly that "the petit a is the cause of the subject." It causes the subject to emerge as a desiring subject, as the subject of desire. Desire is, in this sense, part of what one gets in exchange for the sacrifice of one's enjoyment.

Those words make me laugh. I never talk about freedom.

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

When it comes to fantasy formations, it is therefore essential to distinguish between (1) unconscious fantasies that curb our existential options and (2) imaginative and creative fantasies that allow us to observe the world from novel angles. Lacan's assault on narcissistic fantasies is directed at the former, whereas his commentary on the poetic potentialities of language could be argued to relate to the latter.

Lacan is concerned with lack as the ontological underpinning of human existence.

One might say that instead of regarding psychoanalysis primarily as a therapeutic method, Lacan envisions it as a profoundly philosophical undertaking that—a bit like traditional renderings of the art of living—possesses the potential to revise the subject's perception of the basic orientation of its existence.

The multi-faceted defense of a certain notion of benign mimesis both in Critical Theory and the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has also attracted attention, as have certain affinities with Lacan's critique of ego psychology.