By Proxy

I have discovered an interesting software program, as yet unavailable to the general public. It automatically discovers anticipations and approximations of Lacanian concepts. If you type in the name of any modern thinker, it will immediately produce a quote which anticipates a Lacanian notion. Eg:

Sartre-Lacan:

‘Culture, for him, is theft: it reduces the vague and vast natural consciousness to its being-other, to what it is for others. The word is a thing; introduced into a soul it reabsorbs the soul in its own generality.
(Sartre, The Family Idiot, vol.1, p. 30).

Bergson-Lacan:

‘What a childhood we should have had if only we had been left to do as we pleased! We should have flitted from pleasure to pleasure. But all of a sudden, an obstacle arose, neither visible nor tangible: a prohibition. Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents or teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves that from their status in relation to us. They occupied a certain station; that was the source of the command which, had it issued from some other quarter, would not have possessed the same weight. In other words, parents and teachers seemed to act by proxy.’ (Bergson, Key Writings, p. 295.)