Persons [ ] I / The Other / Love / Anxiety / Gaze / Truth | Jacques Lacan, 1901- 81
I
“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.”
“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.” *
“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.”
“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
“What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it 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.”
“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.”+
The Other
“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”
“The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.”
“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?”
“The I is always in the field of the Other.”
“The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.”
“The unconscious is structured like a language. The unconscious is structured by a language.
The unconscious is structured like the assemblages in question in set theory, which are like
letters.”
“The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.”
Love
“Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.”
“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
“A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned
that it is in hiding that she offers to them most truly.”
“Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable.
And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being
were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into
existence as an exact function of this lack.”
Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but
the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.
”When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex. ” ~
”From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of
is having given ground relative to one’s desire” +
“Desire is always what is inscribed as a repercussion of the articulation
of language at the level of the Other.”
“Castration means that that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained
on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.”
“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you
– the object petit a – I mutilate you.” *
There is something in you I like more than yourself.
Therefore I must destroy you”
“Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension.”
”Love is a pebble laughing in the sun.” #
Anxiety
“We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.”
“The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul,
just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire
communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.”
“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.” *
”The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life. This
consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs. No such purpose as that of keeping itself
alive or of protecting itself from dangers by means of anxiety can be attributed to the id.
That is the task of the ego, whose business it also is to discover the most favourable and
least perilous method of obtaining satisfaction, taking the external world into account. ” –
”The forces which we assume to exist behind the tensions caused by the needs of the id are called instincts. After long hesitancies and vacillations we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct. The contrast between the instincts of self- preservation and the preservation of the species, as well as the contrast between ego-love and object- love, fall within Eros.”
“Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss…with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo”
“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.”
Gaze
“The gaze that I encounter–you can find this in Sartre’s own writing–
is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.”
“The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.”
“If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.”
“The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene
would be possible.”
“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.”
Truth
“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.”
“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”
“It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.”
“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.”
“For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.”
“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.” ^
“The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.”
“Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves,
there would be no purloined letters.”
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan, 1901- 81
critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.
* The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1973 /~ On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1981
