Terry Eagleton puts it this way: “for Lacan all discourse is, in a sense, a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say, or say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. We can certainly never articulate the truth in some ‘pure’ unmediated way: Lacan’s own notoriously... Read more

Terry Eagleton puts it this way: “for Lacan all discourse is, in a sense, a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say, or say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. We can certainly never articulate the truth in some ‘pure’ unmediated way: Lacan’s own notoriously... Read more

In a web article on the “Cult of Lacan,” Richard Webster analyzes a paragraph from one of Lacan’s early works. Referring to his “mirror” theory of childhood development (which, Webster shows, Lacan borrowed without much attribution from one Henri Wallon), Lacan writes, “This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursing dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I... Read more

In a web article on the “Cult of Lacan,” Richard Webster analyzes a paragraph from one of Lacan’s early works. Referring to his “mirror” theory of childhood development (which, Webster shows, Lacan borrowed without much attribution from one Henri Wallon), Lacan writes, “This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursing dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I... Read more

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Developing Freud’s theorisation of sexuality, Lacan’s contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction. Lacan’s stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child’s attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with... Read more