Jacques Lacan Quotes

A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

There is the name and the thing; the name is a sound which sets a mark on and denotes the thing. The name is no part of the thing nor of the substance; it is an extraneous piece added to the thing, and outside of it.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

The perception of what a thing is and the perception of what it means are not separate, either.

A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.

Meaning, however, is no great matter.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

Prateik means symbol so I symbolise certain things in my life.

Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.