"The analyst's desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confront with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it." [276]
"You apprehend by the same token the function of the gaze in hypnosis, which may be fulfilled in
fact by a crystal stopper, or anything, so long as it shines. To define hypnosis as the confusion, at one point, of the ideal signifier in which the subject is mapped with the a, is the most assured structural definition that has been advanced." 273]
"Take Socrates. The inflexible purity of Socrates and his atopia are correlative. Intervening, at every moment, there is the demonic voice. Could one maintain that the voice that guides Socrates is not Socrates himself? The relation between Socrates and his voice is no doubt an enigma, which indeed, tempted psychographers on several occasions in the early nineteenth century, and it is already a great merit on their part that they dared to broach the matter since nowadays one daren't touch it with a bargepole." [258]
"To love is, essentially, to wish to be loved." [253]
"Interpretation is not open to any meaning. This would be to concede to those who rise up against the character of uncertainty in analytic interpretation that, in effect, all interpretations are possible, which is patently absurd. The fact that I have said that the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud's own term, of non-sense, does not mean that interpretation is in itself nonsense." [250]
"But psychoanalysis shows us that what, above all in the initial phase, most limits the confidence of the patient, his abandonment to the analytic rule, is the threat that the psychoanalyst may be deceived by him. How often in our experience does it happen that we discover only very late some important biographical detail? Suppose, for example, that at a particular moment in his life, the subject contracted a venereal disease. But why didn't you tell me earlier one might ask, if one is still naive enough. Because, the analysand may reply, if I had told you earlier, you might have regarded it as responsible, in part at least, perhaps even wholly, for my disorders and I am not here for you to find an organic cause for them." [233]
"What do diplomats do when they address one another? They simply exercise, in relation to one another, that function of being pure representatives and, above all, their own signification must not intervene. When diplomats are addressing one another, they are supposed to represent something whose signification, while constantly changing, is, beyond their own persons, France, Britain, etc. In the very exchange of views, each must record only what the other transmits in his pure function as signifier, he must not take into account what the other is, qua presence, as a man who is likable to a greater or lesser degree. Interpsychology is an impurity in this exchange." [220]
"Everything emerges from the structure of the signifier. This structure is based on what I first called the function of the cut and which is now articulated, in the development of my discourse, as the topological function of the rim." [206]
"... there is an ultimate field, the field of sexual fulfillment, in which, in the last resort, the innocent does not know the way." [204]
"In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as a male or female being." [204]
"I must, very quickly, point out to you the difference between making oneself heard and making oneself seen. In the field of the unconscious the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed. Whereas making oneself seen is indicated by an arrow that really comes back towards the subject, making oneself heard goes towards the other." [195]
"I apologize if, as someone remarked last time, there are some obscurities along the way I take you. I believe that obscurity is characteristic of our field." [187]
"Why are the so-called erogeneous zones recognized only in those points that are differentiated for us by their rim-like structure?" [168]
"This, of course, brings us to genetics. And what emerges from this genetics if not the dominant function, in the determination of certain elements of the living organism, of a combinatory that operates at certain of its stages by the expulsion of remainders?" [151]
"He [the therapist] then seeks for assurances in theories that operate in the direction of an orthopaedic, conformist therapeutics, providing access for the subject to the most mythical conception of happiness. Together with an uncritical manipulation of evolutionism, this is what sets the tone of our era." [135]
"This is essential in noting the paradox that is expressed quite commonly in the fact -- which may even be found in Freud's writings -- that the analyst must await the transference before beginning to give his interpretation. I want to stress this question because it is the dividing line between the correct and incorrect conception of the transference ... To appeal to some healthy part of the subject thought to be there in the real, capable of judging with the analyst what is happening in the transference, is to misunderstand that t is precisely this part that is concerned in the transference, that it is this part that closes the door, or the window, or the shutters, or whatever -- and that the beauty with whom one wishes to speak is there, behind, only too willing to open the shutters again." [130]
"What I mean by obscurantism is, in particular, the function assume psychoanalysis in the propagation of a style that calls itself the American way of life, in so far as it is characterized by the revival of notions long since refuted in the field of psychoanalysis, such as the predominance of the functions of the ego." [127]
"The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier." [126]
"I was thinking that in the Bible, for example, there must be passages in which the eye confers the baraka or blessing. There are a few small places where I hesitated — but no. The eye may be prophylactic, but it cannot be beneficent — it is maleficent. In the Bible and even in the New Testatement, there is no good eye, but there are evil eyes all over the place." [118 - 19]
"How could this showing satisfy something, if there is not some appetite of the eye on the part of the person looking? This appetite of the eye that must be fed produces the hypnotice value of painting. For me, this value is to be sought on a much less elevated plane than might be supposed, namely, in that which is the true function of the organ of the eye, the eye filled with voracity, the evil eye. It is striking, when one thinks of the universality of the function of the evil eye, that there is no trace anywhere of a good eye, of an eye that blesses. What can thi smean, except that the eye carries with it the fatal function of being in itself endowed — if you will allow me to play on several registers at once — with a power to separate." [115]
"If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall its leave? What it amounts to is the first act in the laying down of the gaze." [114]
"In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it -- that is what we call the gaze." [73]
"Whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, is merely alienation of its meaning. The adult, and even the more advanced child, demands something new in his activities, in his games. But this 'sliding-away' (glissement) conceals what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition in itself." [61]
"Father, can't you see I'm burning? This sentence is itself a firebrand -- of itself it brings fire where it falls -- and one cannot see what is burning, for the flames blind us to the fact that the fire bears on the Unterlegt, on the Untertragen, on the real." [59]
"Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence -- it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics." [47]
"And there is only one method of knowing that one is there, namely, to map the network. And how is a network mapped? One goes back and forth over one's ground, one crosses one's path, one cross-checks it always in the same way ..." [45]
"The ancients recognized all kinds of things in dreams, including, on occasion, messages from the gods -- and why not? The ancients made something of these messages from the gods. And, anyway -- perhaps you will glimpse this in what I shall say later -- who knows, the gods may still speak through dreams. Personally, I don't mind either way. What concerns us is the tissue that envelops these messages, the network in which, on occasion, something is caught." [44 - 45]
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI:
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964)
Jacques Lacan
