Abstract
This essay is situated at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis and addresses the transformation of subjectivity in the age of cyberspace and Artificial Intelligence. Its central claim is that these technological dispositifs do not merely represent technical progress, but rather bring about a structural reconfiguration of the symbolic regime within which language, desire, and jouissance are articulated. From this perspective, the combined reference to Jacques Lacan and G.W.F. Hegel allows for a critical interrogation of the theoretical stakes of this transformation, precisely where the function of negativity is at issue. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, Artificial Intelligence is interpreted as a new machine of the Symbolic, capable of producing autonomous chains of signifiers and of simulating the instance of the big Other. In Lacanian terms, AI can be understood as a technical configuration of the function i(a): a serial production of master signifiers directly articulated with object a, which tends to bypass the mediation of symbolic lack. AI is therefore not a subject, but an Other without an unconscious—an Other that operates without repression, slips, or desire, yet one that profoundly affects the structure and modalities of manifestation of the human unconscious, fostering the emergence of a One-jouissance that is immediate and non-dialectical. On the philosophical level, this configuration is brought into dialogue with the Hegelian dialectic of being and nothingness, and more specifically with the function of Negativity as the generative principle of becoming and of the Concept. Whereas in Hegel negativity prevents being from stabilizing itself in an immediate positivity and instead opens the space of mediation and determination, the algorithmic regime of Artificial Intelligence tends to neutralize negativity in favor of a self-referential circulation of data and information. In this sense, AI appears as a regime of positivity without negation, in which knowledge functions independently of lack. The essay argues that this neutralization of negativity produces a structural convergence between the functioning of Artificial Intelligence and what Lacan formalized as the discourse of capitalism: a discourse in which knowledge is radically separated from truth, and the subject is reduced to a point of consumption of jouissance. Within this framework, AI operates as an accelerator of the capitalist logic of enjoyment, progressively displacing desire in favor of an integral management of jouissance. To address Lacan, Artificial Intelligence, and Hegel today thus means to interrogate the destiny of the subject in the age of advanced technics, where language seems to function without a body and knowledge without lack. The essay contends that only a theoretical perspective capable of holding together Lacanian psychoanalysis and the dialectics of negativity can identify the critical core of this transformation: the risk of an erasure of desire as an effect of the foreclosure of negation, and, at the same time, the possibility of thinking forms of symbolic resistance that reinscribe lack and negativity within cyberspace itself.