Quotes by Jacques Lacan

“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.”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“...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...”

“Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.”

“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.”

“A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.”

“We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.”

“As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests it...”

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

“A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.”

“The man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.”

“The important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands. Sooner or later, something would have been found, humer...”

“It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one's attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel- the navel of the dreams, he writes , to designate their...”

“Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon-discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation.”

“Nature provides-I must use the word- signifies, and these signifies organize human relation in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.”

“There are thoughts in this field of the beyond of consciousness, and it is impossible to represent these thoughts other than in the same homology of determination in which the subject of the I thin...”

“By, the subject, where it was, where it has always been, the dream. The ancients recognized all kinds of things in dreams, including, on occasion, messages from the gods—and why not? The ancients m...”

“Pleasure limits the scope of human possiblity-the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary, its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the r...”

“It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, ei...”