Posthumanism Love In The Time Of AI

Wright, Colin

Abstract

Posthumanism, with its visions of disembodied technological transcendence, has tended to dismiss psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on bodily drives and unconscious fantasies, as part of the outmoded Humanist framework posthumanism criticises. This contribution will argue this is a mistake: psychoanalysis has always been 'post-human', mounting its own sustained critique of Humanism. Precisely by recognising the transhumanist dream of technological transcendence as a fantasy, psychoanalysis can allow us to focus our analytical attention on what remains uncanny in the posthuman, including the status of the sexed body and of the drives. This contribution will outline the missed encounter between posthumanism and particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis. It will do so by undertaking a Lacanian reading of the 2013 film, Her, in which important questions are posed about love, desire, and sex in human-machine relations.

• Acceptance Date: Aug 1, 2021
• Publication Date: Apr 6, 2023
• Deposit Date: Sep 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 8, 2023
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Book Title: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis
• Chapter Number: 33
• ISBN: 9781350184152
• Keywords: Posthumanism; Jacques Lacan; Psychoanalysis
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/25366540
• Publisher URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury-handbook-to-literature-and-psychoanalysis-9781350184152/