The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 Quotes

“From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire (Seminar 7, 319)”
― Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960

“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

“Does art imitate what it represents? In offering the imitation of an object, artists make something different out of that object. Thus they only pretend to imitate.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960

“[of the human body:] "It was once, though it no longer is, a divine form. It is the cloak of all possible phantasms of human desire. The flowers of desire are contained in this vase whose contours we attempt to define.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960

“L'unica cosa di cui si possa essere colpevoli è di aver ceduto sul proprio desiderio”
― Jacques Lacan, Il seminario. Libro VII: L'etica della psicoanalisi

“The 'fool' is an innocent, a simpleton, but truths issue from his mouth that are not simply tolerated but adopted, by virtue of the fact that this 'fool' is sometimes clothed in the insignia of the jester. And in my view it is a similar happy shadow, a similar fundamental 'foolery,' that accounts for the importance of the left-wing intellectual. And I contrast this with the designation for that which the same tradition furnishes a strictly contemporary term, a term that is used in conjunction with the former, namely, 'knave.' Everyone knows that a certain way of presenting himself, which constitutes part of the ideology of the right-wing intellectual, is precisely to play the role of what he is in fact, namely, a 'knave.' In other words, he doesn't retreat from the consequences of what is called realism; that is, when required, he admits he's a crook.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Vol. Book VII) (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan) by Jacques Lacan