1001Philosophers

Jacques Lacan Quotes on Knowledge

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose return to Freud through structural linguistics reshaped psychoanalytic theory and exerted a wide influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy, literary theory, and feminist thought. This page collects quotes attributed to Jacques Lacan on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.

Quotes

  • Attributed to Jacques Lacan:

    “The unconscious is structured like a language.”

  • “Interview in 1957 [ specific citation needed ]”

    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 important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands. Sooner or later, something would have been found, humeral determinate, for example- for Freud, it would be quite immaterial. For what the unconscious does it to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real- a real that may not be determined.”

    The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
  • “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours”

    The important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands. Sooner or later, something would have been found, humeral determinate, for example- for Freud, it would be quite immaterial. For what the unconscious does it to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real- a real that may not be de
  • “It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one's attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel- the navel of the dreams , he writes , to designate their ultimately unknown centre- which is simply, like the anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken.”

    The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
  • “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours”

    It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one's attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel- the navel of the dreams , he writes , to designate their ultimately unknown centre- which is simply, like the anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken.
  • “Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon-discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation.”

    The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
  • “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours”

    Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon-discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation.
  • “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours”

    Nature provides-I must use the word- signifies, and these signifies organize human relation in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.