Lacan Quotes

“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”

— Gilles Deleuze

As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.

— Slavoj Žižek

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”

— Jacques Lacan

Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or…

— Camille Paglia

“From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire…

— Jacques Lacan

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary…

— Alain Badiou

It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked…

— Camille Paglia

“We see not because everything is visible, but because something always defies the eye, persisting beyond the remit of mere representation. This…

— Fabio Vighi

Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated…

— Camille Paglia

“What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian ' il n'y a pas de rapport ...': if, for…

— Slavoj Žižek

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is…

— Jacques Lacan

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood.…

— Noam Chomsky

If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally…

— Judith Butler

...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies…

— Jacques Lacan

“[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and…

— Terry Eagleton

“Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They…

— Terry Eagleton

“...when do I actually encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language', in the rel of his or her being? Not when…

— Slavoj Žižek

“If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to…

— Terry Eagleton

“What Althusser does… is to rethink the concept of ideology in terms of Lacan’s ‘imaginary’. For the relation of an individual subject…

— Terry Eagleton

“In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But…

— Terry Eagleton

“Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only…

— Terry Eagleton