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Life
He argued that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that the self we think we are is built on a founding misrecognition formed the first time a baby sees its own reflection.
He showed that the asylum, the prison, and the clinic are not neutral institutions but machines for defining who counts as normal.
Connection
Jacques Lacan the Parisian structuralist moment Michel Foucault — Lacan and Foucault moved in the same Parisian intellectual circles and shared a broad structuralist suspicion of the unified, self-knowing subject, even as Foucault increasingly distanced his own genealogical method from psychoanalysis's universalizing claims.
Ideas
Words
“The unconscious is structured like a language.”
“The mirror stage is a drama... which manufactures for the subject... the succession of fantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality.”
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
“Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared. Power is exercised from innumerable points.”
Key Moments
1949 (revised)
Presents the mirror stage
1963
Expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association
1970-84
Chair of the History of Systems of Thought, Collège de France
25 June 1984
Death in Paris
Works
Écrits
Discipline and Punish