The symbolic in the early lacan as a cybernetic machine, as automaton and tyché, and the question of the real

pp. 99-126

in: Raul Moncayo, Knowing, not-knowing, and jouissance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

This chapter argues that even if a computer or artificial intelligence could operate according to negative dialectics, the computer would still not experience jouissance, whether primitive or original. Inexistance or non-existance for the computer is simply the negative or absence of a number but not a form of jouissance that in speaking beings can be evoked by the negative as a presence from which light ushers forth. Jouissance and the signifier are of different orders but are not incompatible. They are incommensurable in the sense that there is no metalanguage that would resolve/reduce/translate them to a common language or standard, but they are compatible in the sense that they interpenetrate: there are words of jouissance and jouissance within words.