“It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”
Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)
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Jacques Lacan20
French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist 1901–1981Related quotes
Gregg Toland (1904–1948) American cinematographer
" The Motion Picture Cameraman http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=178", Theatre Arts Magazine, September, 1941.
David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature
Part 4, Section 6
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding
“Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.”
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist
Sometimes attributed to Heisenberg, this was actually a statement made by Niels Bohr, as quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
Some things are so serious that one can only joke about them.
Variant without any citation as to author in Denial is not a river in Egypt (1998) by Sandi Bachom, p. 85
Misattributed
“Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.”
Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist
As quoted in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery (2000) by Abraham Pais, p. 24
Some things are so serious that one can only joke about them.
Variant without any citation as to author in Denial is not a river in Egypt (1998) by Sandi Bachom, p. 85.
Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet
Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Source: Character of the Happy Warrior http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww302.html (1806), Line 48.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author
A Writer's Diary, Volume 1: 1873-1876 (1994), p. 734 http://books.google.com.br/books?id=38xQHS4h0yEC&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-BR&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false