Jacques Lacan also became a psychiatrist and acted in Renoir's movie French Cancan. Lacan himself was influenced by surrealists, including Spanish painter Salvador Dali, inspiring Lacan to devise a unique synthesis of psychiatry and Surrealism. He pushed for psychiatry to go "back to Freud's" basic principles, and his theories have been categorized as "post-structuralism." His interdisciplinary approach has been credited with his theories becoming influential outside of psychology, for example, in philosophy. His students include anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and philosopher Michel Foucault. His critics include the U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky. Lacan much preferred public seminars to writing.
One of his daughters Sybille (1940-2013) is a translator who wrote a memoir on her father: "Un Pre".
Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.
. . . Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.
In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.
I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.
A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.
We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.
As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?.
