A Symbol (n.) envelops a life in a network so total that it joins his parents before he is born, shapes his destiny at birth, gives him the words that make him faithful or renegade, and follows him beyond his death to the last judgement.
A Symbol (n.) does not only make things unreal; broken off as a chain, it bursts into the real.
A Symbol (n.) once invented creates its own past: as soon as a part of the symbolic world exists, it seems always to have been there.
A Symbol (n.) made autonomous risks being God back in a mask: shown out of one door, he returns by the other.
Symbol (n.) go on mounting one another while the subject isn't thinking about them — copulating, proliferating, fertilising each other, tearing each other apart.
A Symbol (n.) already plays, and produces by itself its own necessities, structures and organisations — before any causal bond is attached to it.
A Symbol (n.) in cybernetics is embodied in an apparatus without being confused with it — the apparatus is only its support, and the embodiment is literally trans-subjective.
A Symbol (n.) need not transpose — the ploughman's copulation with the earth is not a symbolization of the sexual act but the equivalent of a symbolic copulation.
Symbol (n.) begets intelligent beings — and that is not a metaphor.
Symbol (n.) is what saves us: because the subject inhabits a world of others who speak, his desire can be mediated by recognition instead of exhausting itself in the wish to destroy the other.
Symbol (n.) reverses presence and absence: absence is evoked in presence and presence in absence — and by cancelling the existing thing it opens the world of negativity that makes up human discourse and human reality.
Symbol (n.) is worthless on its own — the ring that stands for the sun means nothing until it is placed among other symbols; a symbol only has value organised in a world of symbols.
Symbol (n.) is not something the child invents playing at making a toy vanish and return; it is already there, enormous, filling libraries and surrounding him on all sides.
Symbol (n.) is not a flower rising from the depths of man, as the Jungians would have it; it is what envelops and shapes creation.
A Symbol (n.) means pact — and its objects are destined to be useless: pots made to remain empty, shields too heavy to carry, lances stuck into the ground.