The Self and Its Pleasures Quotes

“At the same time, because the phallus is a signifier, that is, because it is part of a relational linguistic (i.e., Saussurian) system, it is not the “truth” about sexual difference. Instead, it represents a truth about the constructedness of sexual difference that is always, in Lacan’s word, “veiled.”111 For Lacan, patriarchy no longer functioned as the foundation of truth but became instead an anchor of cultural fictions.112 That is, the father is both authentic and a charlatan, a man who doesn’t know he is also always other.”
― Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject

“Lacan braught up Aimée’s case again in order to develop his earlier argument that madness was not evidence of an impoverished mind, of a falling away fram reality, but of an irreparable self: “Madness, far fram being an accident befalling an organism because of its frailties, is the permanent virtuality of a rift opened in its very essence”).92 Paranoids are mad not because their selves are irreparable but because they seek to mend the inevitable rift between the real, irreparable and the ideal or imaginary self.”
― Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject