Jacques Lacan Quotes

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

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

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.

The I is always in the field of the Other.

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.

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

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

...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.

The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.

The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

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.

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

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.

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.

Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

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