Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan, known simply as Jacques Lacan, was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially those associated with post-structuralism. His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth13 April 1901
abstract broken emphasis essential general original phenomena remain type whose work
But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.
cannot letter particular unlike wherever
Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.
past perfect becoming
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.
morning baltimore early-morning
The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.
real
The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
language unconscious
The unconscious is structured like a language.
mean doe obsession
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.
gestures faces cards
What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?
discourse unconscious
The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
thinking my-thoughts
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.
relation position
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.
reason poetry-is
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
fields
The I is always in the field of the Other.
lying desire rooms
...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.