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
Speak
Onto
Truth
Holds
Whole
Literally
Real
Fail
Way
Failing
Always
Saying
Impossible
Words
Impossibility

More quotes by Jacques Lacan

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Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
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All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.
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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.
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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.
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The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
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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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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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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 Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
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The I is always in the field of the Other.
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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?
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The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
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What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
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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.
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Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.
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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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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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I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought I think of what I am where I do not think to think.
Jacques Lacan
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The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.
Jacques Lacan
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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.
Jacques Lacan