This is why I have decided to illustrate for you today a truth which may be drawn from the moment in Freud's thought we have been studying – namely, that it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject – by demonstrating in a story the major determination the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
This example demonstrates how communication can give the impression, at which theorists too often stop, of conveying in its transmission bur one meaning, as though the highly significant commentary into which he who hears integrates it could be considered neutralized because it is unperceived by he who does not hear.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
Language hands down its sentence to those who know how to hear it: through the use of the article employed as a partitive particle. Indeed, it is here that spirit – if spirit be living signification – seems, no less singularly, to allow for quantification more than the letter does.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
For the signifier is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
If we could say that a letter has fulfilled its destiny after having served its function, the ceremony of returning letters would be a less commonly accepted way to bring to a close the extinguishing of the fires of Cupid's festivities. The signifier is not functional.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
If what Freud discovered, and rediscovers ever more abruptly, has a meaning, it is that the signifier's displacement determines subjects' acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless of their character or sex; and that everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven follows willy-nilly the signifier's train, like weapons and baggage.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
Now, what I want to achieve is that the patient [malade] be heard in the proper manner at the moment at which he speaks. For it would be strange for one to listen only for the idea of what leads him astray at the moment at which he is simply prey to truth.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
Man literally devotes his time to deploying the structural alternative in which presence and absence each find their jumping-off point [prennent ... leurappel]. It is at the moment of their essential conjunction and, so to speak, at the zero point of desire that the human object comes under the sway of the grip which, cancelling out its natural property, submits it henceforth to the symbol's conditions.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
At the outset, subjectivity has no relation to the real, but rather to a syntax which is engendered by the signifying mark there.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
This position regarding the autonomy of the symbolic is the only position that allows us to clarify the theory and practice of free association in psychoanalysis. For relating its mainspring to symbolic determination and to its laws is altogether different from relating it to the scholastic presuppositions of an imaginary inertia that prop it up in associationism, whether philosophical or pseudophilosophical, before claiming to be experimental.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'. 1955.
In order to conceive what happens in the domain proper to the human order, we must start with the idea that this order constitutes a totality. In the symbolic order the totality is called a universe. The symbolic order from the first takes on its universal character.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
Everything which is human has to be ordained within a universe constituted by the symbolic function. It's not for nothing that Levi-Strauss calls his structures elementary - he doesn't say primitive. Elementary is the opposite of complex.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
It would be very easy to prove to you that the machine is much freer than the animal. The animal is a jammed machine. It's a machine with certain parameters that are no longer capable of variation. And why? Because the external environment determines the animal, and turns it into a fixed type.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
There is a mutation taking place in the function of the machine, which is leaving all those who are still bent on criticising the old mechanism miles behind. To be a little ahead means realising that this has as its consequences the complete reversal of all the classical objections raised to the use of purely mechanistic categories.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
In its most essential aspect, the ego is an imaginary function. That is a discovery yielded by experience, and not a category which I might almost qualify as a priori, like that of the symbolic.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
In man, there's already a crack, a profound perturbation of the regulation of life. That's the importance of the notion introduced by Freud of the death instinct. Not that the death instinct is such an enlightening notion in itself. What has to be comprehended is that he was forced to introduce it so as to remind us of a salient fact of his experience just when it was beginning to get lost.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
We aren't at all like planets, that's something we can have a sense of whenever we want, but that doesn't prevent us from forgetting it. We always have a tendency to reason about men as if they were moons, calculating their masses, their gravitation.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
Here there's a radical difference between my non-satisfaction and the supposed satisfaction of the other. There is no image of identity, of reflexivity, but a relation of fundamental alterity.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
When one is disappointed, one is always wrong. You should never be disappointed with the answers you receive, beca use if you are, that's wonderful, it proves that it was a real answer, that is to say exactly What you weren't expecting.
Lacan, Jacques and Sylvana Tomaselli (Translator). Seminar II. 1954-55.
Optical images possess a peculiar diversity - some of them are purely subjective, these are the ones we call virtual, whereas others are real, namely in some respects, behave like objects and can be taken for such. More peculiar still - we can make virtual images of those objects which are real images. In such an instance, the object which is the real image quite rightly has the name of virtual object.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
When you see a rainbow, you're seeing something completely subjective. You see it at a certain distance as if stitched on to the landscape. It isn't there. It is a subjective phenomenon. But nonetheless, thanks to a camera, you record it entirely objectively. So, what is it?
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
That is what I insist upon in my theory of the mirror-stage – the sight alone of the whole form of the human body gives the subject an imaginary mastery over his body, one which is premature in relation to a real mastery.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
Development only takes place in so far as the subject integrates himself into the symbolic system, acts within it, asserts himself in it through the use of genuine speech. It isn't even essential, you should note, that this speech be his own.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
Speech can express the being of the subject, but, up to a certain point, it never succeeds in so doing.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
Full speech is speech which aims at, which forms, the truth such as it becomes established in the recognition of one person by another. Full speech is speech which performs.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
To be sure, the object is not devoid of reference to speech. From the start, it is already partially given in the system of objects, or objective system, in which one should include the accumulated prejudices which make up a cultural community, up to and including the hypotheses, the psychological prejudices even, from the most sophisticated generated by scientific work to the most naive and spontaneous, which most certainly do not fail considerably to influence scientific references, to the point of impregnating them.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference – something takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
Even in the animal kingdom, you have been able to see that it is in relation to the same actions, the same behaviour, that we can distinguish precisely the functions of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, for the simple reason that they do not belong in the same order of relations.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
...it's the symbolic relation which defines the position of the subject as seeing. It is speech, the symbolic relation, which determines the greater or lesser degree of perfection, of completeness, of approximation, of the imaginary.
Lacan, Jacques and John Forrester (Translator). Seminar I. 1953-54.
It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image-an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity's term, "imago".
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
For the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates it.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
As I myself have shown, human knowledge is more Independent than animal knowledge from the force field of desire because of the social dialectic that structures human knowledge as paranoiac; but what limits it is the “scant reality” surrealistic unsatisfaction denounces therein .
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
The Objective notions of the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal tracts and of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism in the newborn confirm my view that we find in man a veritable specific prematurity of birth.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
This fragmented body – another expression I have gotten accepted into the French school's system of theoretical references – is regularly manifested in dreams when the movement of an analysis reaches a certain level of aggressive disintegration of the individual. It then appears in the form of disconnected limbs or of organs exoscopically represented, growing wings and taking up arms for internal persecutions that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch fixed for all time in painting, in their ascent in the fifteenth century to the Imaginary zenith of modern man.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge [savoir] Into being mediated by the other's desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it correponds to a natural maturation process.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
At the end of a society's historical enterprise to no longer recognize that it has any but a utilitarian function, and given the individual's anxiety faced with the concentration-camp form of the social link whose appearance seems to crown this effort, existentialism can be judged on the basis of the justifications it provides for the subjective impasses that do, indeed, result therefrom: a freedom that is never so authentically affirmed as when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment that expresses the inability of pure consciousness to overcome any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of sexual relationships; a personality that achieves self-realization only in suicide; and a consciousness of the other that can only be satisfied by Hegelian murder.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis provide us schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the balance arm of the psychoanalytic scales – when we calculate the angel of its threat to entire communities – provides us with an amortization rate for the passions of the city.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
At this intersection of nature and culture, so obstinately scrutinized by the anthropology of our times, psychoanalysis alone recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever.
Lacan, Jacques and Bruce Fink (Translator). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. 1949.
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