Quote

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.

Jacques Lacan

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Jacques Lacan
Age: 80 †
Born: 1901
Born: April 13
Died: 1981
Died: September 9
Aesthetician
Medical Examiner
Psychiatrist
Psychoanalyst
Translator
Writer
Words
Impossibility
Speak
Onto
Truth
Holds
Whole
Literally
Real
Fail
Way
Failing
Always
Saying
Impossible

More quotes by Jacques Lacan

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I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.
Jacques Lacan
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As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.
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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.
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Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was one has to go on from there.
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The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
Jacques Lacan
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The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
Jacques Lacan
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Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.
Jacques Lacan
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Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.
Jacques Lacan
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Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.
Jacques Lacan
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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
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The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
Jacques Lacan
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What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
Jacques Lacan
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Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see truth rise spontaneously.
Jacques Lacan
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All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.
Jacques Lacan
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The I is always in the field of the Other.
Jacques Lacan
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In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan
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The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
Jacques Lacan
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I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.
Jacques Lacan
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A geometry implies the heterogeneity of locus, namely that there is a locus of the Other. Regarding this locus of the Other, of one sex as Other, as absolute Other, what does the most recent development in topology allow us to posit?
Jacques Lacan
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If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
Jacques Lacan