Your money or your life!


Your money or your life! If I choose the money, I lose both. If I choose life, I have life without the money, namely, a life deprived of something. I think I have made myself clear.

It is in Hegel that I have found a legitimate justification for the term alienating vel. What does Hegel mean by it? To cut a long story short, it concerns the production of the primary alienation, that by which man enters into the way of slavery. Your freedom or your life! If he chooses freedom, he loses both immediately — if he chooses life, he has life deprived of freedom.

― Jacques Lacan, Seminar 11: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, page 212