{"title":"The dialectic of desire: AI chatbots and the desire not to know","authors":"Jack Black","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00406-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00406-4","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Exploring the relationship between humans and AI chatbots, as well as the ethical concerns surrounding their use, this paper argues that our relations with chatbots are not solely based on their function as a source of knowledge, but, rather, on the desire for the subject not to know. It is argued that, outside of the very fears and anxieties that underscore our adoption of AI, the desire not to know reveals the potential to embrace the very loss AI avers. Consequently, rather than proposing a knowledge that seeks to disavow loss, we can instead recognize the potential in loss itself: an opportunity to assert and define the gap inherent to both the subject and AI we create.","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"11 14","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135138072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Psychoanalysis despite neoliberalism","authors":"Simon Dureuil","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00408-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00408-2","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents the effects of neoliberalism in the contemporary world and, in particular, on the subject, through the Foucauldian concept of “entrepreneur-of-the-self”. This entrepreneur has to manage his behaviour, maximise his socioeconomic capital and seek unlimited jouissance through the accumulation of surplus jouissance. But I will show that neoliberalism is not totally hegemonic and that there are some ways of piercing a hole in neoliberal knowledge and truth. Psychoanalysis is one of them because it cannot be assessed or quantified and does not tend to readaptation. It promotes the unconscious knowledge (“savoir-insu” as Lacan says) of the subject. Furthermore, the unconscious itself shows that the subject cannot completely master his own subjectivity nor manage all the aspects of his existence. Finally, psychoanalysis can help the subject to work on his own desire, regardless of the field of value alone.","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"437 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135637141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"National identification: A psychoanalytic understanding of the role of renaming of streets and cities in India","authors":"Karuna Chandrashekar","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00393-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00393-6","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is an engagement with the problem of national identification and attempts to explain why it is so persistent. Beginning with Freud’s formulations around identification with respect to the mass mind and the moving to Lacan, the paper attempts to address questions around the perseverance of national identity. From both a Freudian and Lacanian understanding, identification is an ambivalent process that lasts through a subject’s life. It is the desire for recognition from the Other (in this case the nation) all the while circling around the subject’s own experience of lack. Bolstering this lack is the enjoyment that the Other promises the subject. Using the concepts of the ego-ideal and the ideal ego along with the partial encounters with jouissance, the paper attempts to chart the ways in which identification is encouraged within the Indian nation state and how the contradictory process within it makes national identity difficult to question. The paper takes as its case the renaming of cities and streets in India, under the aegis of the current Indian government. I argue the new names, and the justifications offered for the change, signify the changes occurring in the symbolic order of the nation. These changes offer a “new” iteration of the nation state, where older desires around nation building proliferate.","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"1981 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135637343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Material calculation and its unconscious: approaching computerization with Heidegger and Lacan","authors":"Marc Heimann, Anne-Friederike Hübener","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00407-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00407-3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The following paper focuses on discerning a specific epistemic effect that modern computers and especially the technology of artificial intelligence (AI) have. To discern this effect, it is necessary to reflect on the use of mathematics, that is its practice, and its ontological underpinnings. To do this, we combine Heideggerian and Lacanian concepts to approach the theoretical problem that AI and computers pose to the practice of calculation. The paper discusses that the computer as a material calculator has limiting factors that make it unable to utilize important uses of formalization. Central to this is the forced absence of virtual voids, which compels computers to act as if the symbolic would behold to the same structural axioms as the imaginary. Far from being a simple inability of computers, this proximate failure allows us instead to understand AI and modern computation in terms of their use and misuse as an epistemic tool.","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"7 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135634271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Redreaming the Nation: Embracing Otherness along with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet’s politico-spiritual vision","authors":"Honey Oberoi Vahali, Dimple Oberoi Vahali","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00399-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00399-0","url":null,"abstract":"As the idea of the Nation has gained ascendance in modern times, it has also brought us to the brink of a deepening crisis. The Nation as an ‘imagined community’ operates through multiple exclusions, not only of those who are outside it, but also of aspects of its members that cannot be readily encompassed by its own descriptions and ambitions of national selfhood. Most nations tolerate sub-identities, for example of tribes, clans or regions, only as long as their overall power is not challenged. Any internal voice likely to be perceived as a threat to the Nation generally evokes a brutally suppressive reaction. This writing returns to the thoughts of Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet who is an engaged Buddhist practitioner. By delving into the exiled leader’s dream of free Tibet, it recovers many possible and creative meanings of what a nation could be. Standing close to political visionaries—for instance M.K. Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, B.R. Ambedkar amongst others—who have preceded him, the Dalai Lama too imagines the Nation through a non-antagonistic vision that embraces Otherness and strives for universal oneness. Drawing from Mahayana Buddhism, he provides ethical alternatives to the idea of the Nation as an independent, exclusive and self-sufficient entity. In particular, this writing returns to his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of 1989, in which he dreams of Tibet as a free country where all differences and forms of otherness are embraced and respected. His vision is premised on the belief that a Buddhist deconstructive analysis of ‘self’ would make it possible for self (non-self) and other to co-exist gracefully. Along with Buddhist thought, the present effort uses psychoanalytic theory and the perspective of the unconscious to think through ideas of the Self, Other and the Nation.","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"74 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135413666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion","authors":"Alex J. Holguin","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00388-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00388-3","url":null,"abstract":"What follows is a book review of Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion, by Matthew Clemente. “Eros Crucified” was published by Routledge in 2020 as part of the “Psychology and the Other” series. The review focuses on thematic summarizations of each chapter, with a short set of notes analyzing the form, function, and forthgoing scholarly conversations that the book is likely to offer/invite. This space allocation is in part, due to the considerable prose, non-traditional writing style, and significant scholarly traditions drawn into dialogue with one another (philosophy, psychoanalysis, religious studies) that required further explication. “Eros Crucified” is a considerable text for those seeking a psychoanalytic description of reoccurring religious cultural phenomena, and the implications therein.","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"145 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136294196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Abjection in sports: An ethical approach","authors":"Kutte Jönsson","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00391-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00391-8","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In her essay Powers of Horror , Julia Kristeva investigates the concept of abjection. Essentially, the term means “the state of being cast off” and according to Kristeva it is a feeling of disgust, filth and humiliation, things we tend to reject for becoming subjects and protecting identities. But as I will argue here, by rejecting athletes who dissolve the culturally strict boundaries in sports, the sports organizations become abjects themselves, and consequently evade moral responsibility.","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"208 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation","authors":"Angie Voela","doi":"10.1057/s41282-023-00392-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-023-00392-7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135880340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: After Beyond…? Freud’s death drive and the future of a better world","authors":"R. Ruiz","doi":"10.1057/S41282-020-00205-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/S41282-020-00205-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123992743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The collapse of the function of the father and its effects on gender roles","authors":"P. Verhaeghe","doi":"10.1215/9780822381082-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381082-007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":359157,"journal":{"name":"Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121422158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}