ChatGPT and the Wish for Death: A Freudian Analysis of Uncanny in AI: In this article, Ghoochani explores the concepts of cartography and the relationship between AI and suicide, inspired by Don Kunze’s work and my own perspective. However, the genesis of this idea stems from a conversation I had with my Iranian friend, Roshanak Zarei, earlier today. Time is not linear.

Pierre Menard, Author of the Écrits, The tale of a young scholar at Munich University who was tasked with the challenge of replacing the terms “signifier” and “subject” in Lacan’s Écrits with the archaic terms “word” and “flesh” has been passed down through generations of academics. The young scholar was deeply inspired by Pierre Menard’s attempt to rewrite Don Quixote word-for-word and hoped that his own exercise would reveal new meanings and inspirations that were previously hidden within the text. It was a hot summer day, and the library was empty, but the scholar was motivated purely by his own curiosity and boredom.

Silent Trade and the “Persistence of the Void.” This co-authored essay is based on a conversation that took place on April 15, 2023, between interlocutors Don Kunze and OpenAI’s Chat utility, here re-named “James,” following Kunze’s use of that voice from ReVoicer. AI (James): “The practice of silent trade, also known as “dumb barter” or “dumb trading,” is believed to have been in existence for thousands of years. It was used by various cultures and societies as a way to trade goods without having to make contact or negotiations with strangers, thus avoiding potential conflicts or misunderstandings.” The 4,000+ word conversation ended: “By considering the relation between dreaming and the unconscious, and how the unary trait operates in the production of symptoms, we can potentially gain insights into the workings of the unconscious mind and how it influences conscious experience. However, it’s important to note that theories of the unconscious, including those of Lacan and Freud, are complex and subject to ongoing debate and discussion among scholars and practitioners in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis.”

From the Hero to HAL: Working from Lacan’s “loop diagram” describing the relation of the aim to the goal (Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), the journey is related to the anamorphic trials of the hero willingly facing suffering. The rim becomes the katagraphic mark made by Romulus to found Rome and fill the furrow with the blood of Remus, the beginnings of divination procedures that, repeated, would renew the spiritual and military boundary of the city and constitute its only true region.

Işık Barış Fidaner. From “The neural differentiation of the rim of the drive“: “For Lacan, these rims delineate a field of ‘objectality’ that is distinct from the usual objectivity of modern science. But Lacan has a mythical and tragic notion of this distinct field: “Objectality is the correlate to a pathos of the cut” (Seminar 10). As if humans were whole at the beginning, and then they were pathetically castrated, when the God cut their four rims. What is thereby supposedly cut from the pathetic humans is presumably the mythical Lamella.” Fidaner, a mathematician, AI writer, and Lacanian/ Žižekian, writes about the role of the rim, making it possible to incorporate AM’s idea of the blur and adiabatics and DK/FC’s “new critical terms” (isonomics, cathesis, katagraph, etc.) alongside Lacan’s diagram presented in Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Fidaner’s essay, published independently, is reprinted here without permission; the hope is that this appropriation will not be misunderstood! It is a token of our collective admiration. An additional benefit of Fidaner’s interest in the cut is his familiarity with the work of Leon Brenner on autism. This is not simply an analysis of an under-treated topic in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but a new theoretical domain. Read Brenner’s book, The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language, to convince yourself of this claim.

ChatGPT and Kunze on the subject of Instrumental Convergence. My AI writing partner introduced me to the work of Nick Bostrum and I, in turn, brought in the work of Kurt Vonnegut (intentional political antagonism) and Giambattista Vico (self-evolving, autopoietic cultural convergence). The discussion productively concluded with Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the theorists need to be self-surveillant. In light of instrumental convergence, Bachelard’s cautions convert the in-itself of the objective world into a for-intself, chez Lacan.

The HAL Cartel

In the spirit of Lacan’s proposal that discussion groups, named cartels, should carry out theory projects, four participants, IG, AM, DK, and Francis Conrad (a collectivized identity) have extended the HAL question to reformulate a vocabulary involving anamorphosis and extimacy, topics that Mladen Dolar and Jacques-Alain Miller have claimed can cover the entire Lacanian-Freudian field. They have not left out the idea of AI, since in Lacan’s topological interests, the idea of a “displaced intelligence” is both necessary and critical.

IG’s List, with Francis Conrad’s Response. AM has introduced two important new critical topics:  (1) adiabatics (the behavior of gas obliged to retain heat under varying conditions of pressure, (mistakenly) credited with the creation of the “rain shadow” on leeward sides of mountain ranges; and (2) the blur, the more foundational idea of equality, broadened to convert this mark of distinction, refuted by Hegel, into a thickened space of ambiguity: from | to || to |…|. This is a biography of the katagraphic cut, with its creation of a furrow that “adiabatically” draws forth the scopic ghost as the fluid of (a) blood or (b) ectoplasm. The rim functions as a term common both to psychoanalysis and ethnology, since it is the same katagraphic cut as made by Romulus to divide his identity (|>||) to provide a space of divination (|…|) where “…” is filled by metonymical signifying chains converted into vera narration (Vico).

The Duras-Jensen Question. This is an actual conversation that has been fictionalized to include critical terminology involved in an active dialog about Norbert Weiner’s conjecture that all “computing systems” (machine and human included) design their own destruction. This is Vico’s thesis as well, not to be placed “on the side of the human subject” but rather evidence that Vico was the inventor of the idea of Artificial Intelligence, and that his theory of ricorso was a theoretical space for conversations like this one. Within that space, special terms are required, and the HAL project is the occasion for their elaboration and definition. [This essay is voiced as an email to IG, AM, and DK from Francis Conrad.]

Acoustics/Acousmatics. The invocatory is the fourth of Lacan’s four “partial drives,” and as a speech function it focuses on questions of how sound and hearing are involved in the creation of subjectivity. The importance of cuts or silences is evident in the use of AI voices, where pauses are critical to the perception of AI’s intelligibility, its ability to play the role of a human interlocutor. In the paradigm case of Dracula — “I do not drink … blood” — the pause is critical, and Lacan addresses this in Seminar VIII (Transference) when he describes Pausanius’s “pause” during the Symposium’s discussion of love. This discussion is put on hold awaiting the contributions of a potential fifth participant, TH, an early exponent of the claim that Vico and Lacan are the same person.