How to Read Lacan Quotes

“For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.”
― Slavoj Žižek, How To Read Lacan

“For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence. It does not show an individual the way to accommodate him- or herself to the demands of social reality; instead it explains how something like ‘reality’ constitutes itself in the first place. It does not merely enable a human being to accept the repressed truth about him- or herself; it explains how the dimension of truth emerges in human reality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, How To Read Lacan

“The proper moment of subjective transformation occurs at the moment of declaration.”
― Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan

“It is easy for an academic to claim at a round table that we live in a post-ideological universe - the moment he visits the restroom after the heated discussion, he is again deep-knee in ideology.”
― Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan

“So it was not the intrusion from external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream – in so far as ‘dreaming’ means fantasizing in order to avoid confronting the Real, the father literally woke up so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was as follows: when the smoke disturbed his sleep, the father quickly constructed a dream that incorporated the disturbing element (smoke–fire) in order to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into reality in order to avoid the Real.”
― Slavoj Žižek, How To Read Lacan

“There is a memorable scene in Luis Buñuel’s Phantom of Freedom in which relations between eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at their toilets around the table, pleasantly talking, and when they want to eat, they silently ask the housekeeper: ‘Where is that place, you know?’ and sneak away to a small room in the back. As a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is thus tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a ‘food for thought’:”
― Slavoj Žižek, How To Read Lacan