From law to code

posthumanism as sinthome

Judith Roof

pp. 27-45

in: Svitlana Matviyenko, Judith Roof (eds), Lacan and the posthuman, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Does humanism's focus on ethics, rationality, personal rights and liberties, creativity, and individual insight depend upon the metaphorical symbolic structure (Law), the sinthome, the topological version of the symptom that links the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary? Does a shift in the character of this sinthome from a reliance on speech and metaphor to a belief in the metonymic primacy of matter (an imaginary misunderstanding of the real) account for the emergence of object-oriented and material ways of thinking that reduce the human subject to object? The 'symptom" is a "metaphor," a part of language, a signifier. ¹ In Seminar XXIII (1975), Lacan locates the symptom as the subject's mistake, a stumbling block that signifies a search for meaning in speech and whose formation eventually links the three orders—the symbolic, imaginary, and real—as a way to subtend the subject.

Cited authors

Lacan Jacques