“There are times to act the master, there are times to act the slave - let your partner decide what they want, and act accordingly.”
Source: Woman Over World: The Novel
“Above me, Nigel is muttering in rapid French; I hope he's not telling me what to do, because my limited knowledge of the language does not yet include instructions on how to give head properly.”
Source: Square to the Puck
“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”
Source: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
“Our life begins with parents and our life ends with parents, we wouldn't have existed without them.”
Source: FOREVER GRATEFUL: The Vital Role of Parents in Our Lives
“Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the ‘Other’ — as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed towards this Other, in the shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others — our parents, for instance — unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations — the whole field of the ‘Other’ — which generate it.”
Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction
“[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do.”
Source: Literary Theory: An Introduction
“We see not because everything is visible, but because something always defies the eye, persisting beyond the remit of mere representation. This something, which Pasolini endeavors to situate at the heart of filmmaking, is preceisely 'that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consicousness' (Lacan, 1998).”
Source: Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious
“Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.
Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.
Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'
These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...
Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.
This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland.”
Source: Lecture Notes
“The other concept of truth in Lacan situates the truth, so to speak, in the midst of reality. Here, the discontinuities, ruptures, standstills, and crises of reality are places or points of its truth. The truth is not some impossible and lethal Beyond that can be reached only by transgressing the limits of the Symbolic and the Imaginary –Lacan comes to present it as something that speaks between the lines, detectable in changes of discursivity, in the disturbances, interruptions, and slips of the discourse...”
Source: The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two
“To suggest that we look to the past, to Freud and Lacan, in order to find a new ethical code may seem counterintuitive, but when capital reterritorializes the psyche into systems based on their compatibility with viral market shares of the mental health topographical map, it is hard to argue for an ever-forward, arc of history that always bends toward justice. This is where ethics must come into play.”
Source: Žižek in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy