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
fields
The I is always in the field of the Other.
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.
morning baltimore early-morning
The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.
language unconscious
The unconscious is structured like a language.
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.
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
mirrors world this-world
All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.
real way impossible
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.
mean giving want
Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
giving matter doe
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
real law guarantees
My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.
writing wind flying
Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.