The Challenges of the Living [le vivant]
François Ansermet
“The path followed by civilization today shows that not only does the surplus jouissance support the reality of the fantasy,
but also that it is on track to supporting reality as such. This can be expressed, if you like, in terms of
a reality that has become a fantasy.”
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Jouer la partie”, La Cause du désir, No. 105, p. 26.
Freud differentiates two versions of the death drive: either it is destructive, or it acts internally as if it has to remain silent.[1] Could we be in a new era that involves both simultaneously? While destructiveness in the world is obvious, the silent version of the death drive impacts the living being: it affects it either directly, or through technological devices that aim at substituting or replacing the living by the inanimate.
What is the living [being]? What is life? Is it necessary to differentiate them? For Lacan, the phenomenon of life remains completely impenetrable to us and “continues to elude us, whatever we do.”[2] We experience life because we are alive, but also paradoxically because we are mortal.[3] Such is the paradox of life and the living, which we find at the heart of discontent and anxiety.
Technologies specific to robotics, artificial intelligence and digital technology[4] introduce a relationship to life that brings to the fore the presence of the inanimate. But is it a return to the inanimate state,[5] like the one that Freud attributed to the principle of the death drive?
According to Freud, the passage from the inanimate to life proceeds from a still unknown “force,” not representable[6] to us. Thus, with the appearance of life, this tendency to death – which Freud designates as a death drive, arises inseparably, “brought into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance.”[7]
One could say that the challenge of the living consists in fighting against a tendency to death included in life itself, against “that which in life might prefer death.”[8]
What is going on with the inanimate nowadays? It shows up in a tendency to hybridization, as with Elon Musk’s Neuralink project or in other perspectives that aim to enhance the human being by grafting it onto technological devices that would like to make it a “prosthetic God,”[9] or even a cyborg.[10] This raises the question of knowing what the limit is between the subject, the living being, and the machine. As for Lacan, he posits “the existence of the subject in the living being.”[11] Could we do the same for the digital?
Beyond hybridization, we are also heading towards the direct creation of an artificial life, without the living being, and with the will to put life in the inanimate, such as the robot “Sophia” – built on the basis of Audrey Hepburn’s features and expressions – that was presented at the UN during a speech on artificial intelligence.
Can a machine become human, as in the myth of Pygmalion, or as in Rousseau’s version – that astonishing lyrical scene where the sculptor would like to live through his Galatea: “Oh! may I always be another, so as to want to be her forever.”[12] Losing oneself in the Other is also what the Metaverse proposes through shared virtual spaces, allowing us to be together and separated[13] at the same time.
This type of perspective is also used today to extend the living beyond death through the use of artificial devices, creating a virtual reality with the goal of reuniting with those who are no longer.[14] More still, by creating technological devices embodying the departed living being, through “deadbots” or doubles of a departed person. These latest technological advances have led to the temptation to extend oneself beyond oneself, through digital twins, towards an illusion of immortality.
Are we in the era of a triumph of the inanimate over the living, or on the contrary, is a new version of the living inventing itself out of the inanimate? One cannot curse one’s era! Life itself is perhaps in the process of reinventing itself. When discontent invades the scene based on a reality that has become a fantasy, anxiety remains a stopper that paradoxically can be used in psychoanalysis towards a possible opening. To pass from a petrifying to a subjectivizing anxiety, such is the wager of psychoanalysis in order to go beyond the malaise, and to allow the subject to invent their own answers. Anxiety or creation: whichever they are, the challenges of the living are also challenges for psychoanalysis. It is for us to take them up, case by case, beyond any technological illusion.
References
[1] Freud S., An Outline of Psychoanalysis, tr. J. Strachey, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., 1969, p. 19.
[2] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, tr. S. Tomaselli, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 75.
[3] “For it is not enough to decide the question on the basis of its effect: Death. We need to know which death, the one that life brings, or the one that brings life.” Lacan J., “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” Écrits, tr. B. Fink, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, p. 686.
[4] Cf. Forestier F., Ansermet F., La dévoration numérique, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2021.
[5] Freud S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., 1961, p. 46.
[6] “The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception,” ibid.
[7] Ibid., p. 73.
[8] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, tr. D. Porter, London, Routledge, 1992, p. 128.
[9] Freud S., Civilization and Its Discontents, tr. J. Strachey, New York/London, W.W. Norton & Co., 1961, p. 44 (thanks to Dominique Rudaz for reminding me of this quote from Freud).
[10] Cf. Hoquet T., Cyborg philosophie, Paris, Seuil, 2011.
[11] Lacan J., “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, op. cit., p. 232.
[12] Rousseau J.-J., “Pygmalion, scène lyrique,” Édition thématique du tricentenaire, tr. F. Baker, M. Gullstam, M.T. Schneider, Geneva, Slatkine Editions, 2015, https://performingpremodernity.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Pygmalion-programme.pdf
[13] Cf. Devers N., Les liens artificiels, Paris, Albin Michel, 2022.
[14] Such as this mother who found through virtual reality technology the avatar of her daughter who died at the age of seven: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-virtualreality-reunion-idUSKBN2081D6