Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Lacan

Lacan writes like someone trying to make language itself sweat, and this sentence is a classic example: dense, insistent, slightly adversarial to the reader. The “form of communication” he’s defending isn’t ordinary chat; it’s the symbolic order at work in and through the subject. He’s pushing back against any comforting idea that humans have a clean, pre-linguistic access to “naturally given” objects. Even when something seems immediate, “evanescent” signals how quickly the supposedly raw object slips away the moment it’s perceived.

The key move is the split: the object is “split as it is in its submission to symbols.” Subtext: what you think you’re encountering is never just the thing. The object is carved up by naming, categorizing, desiring, and narrating. For Lacan, symbols don’t merely label experience after the fact; they structure what can count as an object for us in the first place. That’s why he insists the communicative form is “not absent in man” - he’s asserting inevitability. You cannot subtract language and keep the same human.

Contextually, this sits in Lacan’s larger campaign against ego-psychology’s tidy picture of a coherent self mastering reality. He wants a more unsettling anthropology: the human subject is constitutively mediated, thrown into a world where meaning arrives pre-loaded, and where “communication” is less a tool we use than a regime that uses us. The sentence performs its claim: its knotted syntax enacts the very submission it describes, forcing the reader to experience thought as something routed through symbols rather than delivered straight from the real.