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Pleasure limits the scope of human possiblity-the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary, its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle.

— Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

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More quotes by Jacques Lacan

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.

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

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 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

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 father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law- but the inheritance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin.

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

There are thoughts in this field of the beyond of consciousness, and it is impossible to represent these thoughts other than in the same homology of determination in which the subject of the I think finds himself in relation to the articulation of the I doubt.

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

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