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These two recent studies on digital culture and psychoanalysis demonstrate the truism that not only do we need Lacan to understand the digital, but also that we need cybernetic culture to truly understand Lacanian psychoanalysis. Clearly written, and with examples drawn from the most up-to-date popular and digital culture, both texts are essential reading for any scholar who wants to comprehend why the sinthome, the sexual non-relation, the lathouse and the alethospheres - arcane concepts, to be sure, from the Lacaniverse, are as necessary for internet theory as more familiar notions like the algorithm, the platform, social media, and artificial intelligence.
In the conclusion to The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, Isabel Millar declares that her study of the “extimate” (more on that term below) relation between those two concepts has been “largely experimental and speculative in nature” (p. 194). This modest constraint is hardly a limitation, in this reviewer’s view. In nine briskly-paced chapters (the book only lags when it turns to plot summaries, notably that of the Spielberg film A.I. in the conclusion), and drawing on cutting-edge varieties of Lacanian theory - from Alain Badiou on “L’Étourdit” to Jacques-Alain Miller and Lorenzo Chiesa on jouissance and Alenka Zupančič on sexuation - as well as such cultural objects as Black Mirror, Blade Runner 2049,
and Ex Machina, Millar makes a convincing argument that intelligence qua human attribute is already artificial (as are, perhaps, sexuality and language?). Thus in the prologue, Millar drops in a concept she will return to in her conclusion, that of “Roko’s Basilisk,” or the idea that in the future a superintelligence will punish anyone who stymied the development of AI in (today’s) present. Like theories of the simulation (or, that we should not try to determine if we live in a Matrix-like simulation since that will encourage our cybernetic “masters” to turn the whole thing off), the Basilisk or “Si