Jacques Lacan > Quotes

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

”
― Jacques Lacan

“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.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on Technique

“Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
― Jacques Lacan

“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”
― Jacques Lacan

“The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Amar es dar lo que no se tiene”
― Jacques Lacan

“S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race.”
― Jacques Lacan

“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.”
― Jacques Lacan

“That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.”
― Jacques Lacan

“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.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960