The Unconscious in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Scientific Suppression of the Subject and the Technological Jouissance of Capital  

It is commonplace to say that culture is increasingly a technoculture, a technological culture governed and constituted by new technologies, especially digital or cybernetic ones. We know that these technologies have produced and now reproduce a cyberspace that is gaining ground at the expense of the real world. It is as if human existence and relationships are shifting into the digital space we access through computers and smartphones. It is as if this space increasingly encompasses what we are, do, and have.

The Freudian heritage is part of what is shifting into cyberspace. It is increasingly in this digital space that psychoanalysis takes place, where its practice is conducted, its theory is transmitted, its journals are published, its texts are written and read, and its conferences and other events occur. Psychoanalytic ideas and experiences do not seem to spread in the real world; however, they are increasingly present online in websites, search engines, Big Data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI).

There is, therefore, a growing digitalization of psychoanalysis and everything else. This phenomenon has already prompted multiple psychoanalytic reflections. There are two major fields of reflexive work on this issue that sometimes intersect (e.g., Lemma & Caparrotta, 2014) but can be clearly distinguished: one on online psychoanalysis (Brottman, 2012; Migone, 2013; Scharff, 2018) and a broader one on new technologies, the internet, cyberspace, and their relationship with subjective psychic space as conceptualized in psychoanalytic theory (Parker, 2014; Marzi, 2018; De Vos, 2020; Žižek, 2022; Johanssen & Krüger, 2022). Delving into the second field in this article, we reflect on what happens to the subject of psychoanalysis as new technologies develop, increasingly mediating people’s relationships with the world, with each other, and with themselves.

To elucidate the effects of new technologies on the subject of psychoanalysis, we follow Jacques Lacan’s ideas about knowledge, thought, and science. We start from Lacan’s depiction of the computer as something with thought but without knowledge. This depiction allows us to better understand what is at stake in AI. After distinguishing knowledge from the data and information that are fed into algorithms and AI, and that accumulate on the internet and electronic devices, we regard the lack of knowledge in technology as a lack of the subject who is the truth of knowledge. We explain these two lacks by the Lacanian thesis of the ideological suppression of the subject in science, and we situate this suppression in the final moment of the history of knowledge as reconstructed by Karl Marx and Lacan: as a shift of knowledge from the slave or serf, traditional worker, artisan, or peasant to the scientist, professional, or academic and finally to the technology materialized in machines. We then associate the suppression of the subject with what we describe as the jouissance of capital and contrast it with the symptomatic return of the subject in Marxist and Freudian theories, as well as in communist and psychoanalytic praxis. In the last section, we raise the risk of the vanishing of the unconscious in a cyberspace dominated and exploited by the capitalist system.

Computers as Thinking Things

Our access to knowledge seems to be increasingly mediated by new technologies. When a device resolves our doubts, it leaves us with the impression that it knows many things. We have no difficulty attributing knowledge to computers, whether they are the supercomputers of search engines and AI tools, such as Aurora GPT, or smartphones and personal computers with their files and programs.

We accept that computers are full of accumulated knowledge, which does not mean that we see them as capable of thinking like human beings. This is at least what our common sense tells us. However, counterintuitively, Lacan (1973/1999a) maintains exactly the opposite, for he admits that “the computer thinks, but who can say that it knows?” (p. 124). Lacan’s response is categorical: the computer knows nothing.

One may argue that Lacan denied computers’ knowledge (savoir) because there were rudimentary computers in his time. If this were the case, then it would be even more disconcerting that he saw them as Cartesian human souls, as examples of Descartes’s res cogitans, and as thinking things that could assure themselves of the existence of their selves through the cogito: “I think as a computer, therefore I exist as a computer.” How can one attribute thought and, therefore, a thinking transcendental subjectivity to the primitive four-bit microprocessors of the early 1970s?

In reality, if Lacan admits that computers can think, it is not because of his high opinion of them but rather because of his low opinion of thought. Two years after attributing thought to the weak computers of his time, Lacan (1975/1999b) deplored the “extraordinary weakness of thought” after having lamented its “typical imbecility, typical of the mens, of human humor, in relation to the real to which it refers” (pp. 109, 126). Let us say that our imbecile minds have weak thought comparable to that of computers. This is the field of psychology, specifically cognitive psychology, with its computational models of the human mind (Boden, 1988; Lewandowsky & Farrell, 2010).

Computers’ Lack of Knowledge

Thinking is not, then, what distinguishes us as humans from the thinking machines that surround us. What distinguishes us from them, according to Lacan (1973/1999a), is not thought but a certain relationship with knowledge. To begin with, unlike computers, we can access knowledge through various means. One of these is precisely the computer.

Even though they give us access to knowledge, computers know nothing. This does not prevent them from possessing, storing, combining, using, modifying, and generating data, information, and even thoughts, as we see in AI. However, no matter how intelligent they are, computers lack knowledge, at least knowledge as conceptualized by Lacan.

After eliminating the idea that computers possess knowledge, Lacan (1973/1999a) defines knowledge as a body or collection of facts whose foundation is that “the enjoyment of its exercise is the same as that of its acquisition” (p. 124). This condition is not met in computers. To begin with, they are not even capable of acquiring knowledge on their own. Rather, it is human beings who acquire knowledge and lend it to computers by designing them, programming them, and feeding them with data and information.

Even if most current computers and various forms of AI have the capacity to learn and to acquire data and information, this capacity is part of the knowledge we have lent them. It is we, human beings, who have acquired the knowledge of acquiring knowledge and have lent it to computers. It is also we who enjoy this acquisition of knowledge by computers, just as it is we who enjoy the exercise of acquired knowledge—which does not mean exactly that we are the ones who know, who enjoy knowledge, since knowledge belongs to the Other and increasingly to capital, as we will see later.

Knowledge and Jouissance

Computers cannot have any enjoyment or jouissance, presenting the idea of jouissance here, in a precise Lacanian sense, as “possession” and “usufruct” (Lacan, 1967/2023, p. 268; 1973/1999a, pp. 10–11). Understood in this way, jouissance belongs not to computers, which cannot possess or usufruct anything, but to their creators, owners, and users, whether they are taken as subjects-supposed-to-know or recognized as representatives of the Other with its knowledge as “jouissance of the Other” (Lacan, 1970/1991, p. 12). In both cases, the enjoyment of acquiring and exercising knowledge belongs to those who design or buy computers, who own and use them, and who acquire knowledge for them and then use it in a certain way.

It is, then, those we call human beings who, by being able to enjoy knowledge, its acquisition, and its exercise, can know something through computers. However, according to Lacan (1973/1999a), knowledge requires something more: knowledge is only such when it is acquired by exercising it, and when it is possessed by using it—that is, when it is fully enjoyed in both senses of the Lacanian concept: that of possession and that of usufruct.

A good example of knowledge, which is a paradigmatic example for Lacan (1969/2006), is the know-how of traditional workers, peasants, or artisans. These workers possess true knowledge because they learn by applying what they know, and they acquire more knowledge by exercising it, thus enjoying the very act of acquiring and exercising knowledge. Here we have the knowledge of the slave in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1807/2018) dialectic of master and slave: the know-how that distinguishes slave from master, the knowledge of “culturally formative activity” (p. 116), which is at the origin of human culture.

The knowledge of the traditional worker, a knowledge inseparable from labor, can be best appreciated by contrasting it with what Marx (1867/2008) describes as the lack of knowledge of modern proletarians—workers devoid of knowledge and reduced to their labor power. These proletarians have lost the know-how of traditional workers. Unlike artisans in their workshops, modern proletarians neither possess nor benefit from knowledge but only contribute to its exercise by moving levers, pulling pulleys, and performing other simple tasks in large factories in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In these factories, knowledge no longer resides in the workers but is materialized in machines, productive technology, and ultimately computers. However, as we have seen, it is no longer true knowledge precisely because there is no one there to enjoy it by acquiring and exercising it and by possessing and utilizing it.

Knowledge and Its Subject Implication

For knowledge to exist in the strict Lacanian sense of the term, a subject is required, since only a subject can enjoy the acquisition and exercise of knowledge. Hence, knowledge, as Lacan (1969/2006) conceptualizes it, necessarily implies a subject. Lacan (1970/1991) even represents the subject as the truth of knowledge.

The subject is what is missing in computers. Not being subjects, computers cannot know anything, since only as subjects in the place of the Other, as the Other, representing it, could they enjoy what they know. The same can be said of other new technologies, including the various forms of AI, which are not subjects and therefore cannot know anything. This is true even though AI tools can think by combining data and information.

With the unstoppable advance of technological devices and the decline of traditional workers, it seems that knowledge is losing its truth—its subject—and thus losing itself as knowledge, becoming pure technology. Lacan (1970/1991) indeed considered all this as what was already happening in the second half of the 20th century. However, according to Lacan, everything is more complicated as well, and there are two strongholds of resistance in which a return of the subject occurs, allowing for the preservation of knowledge. These strongholds are the Marxist and Freudian perspectives, with their communist and psychoanalytic praxis, respectively.

Marxism and Psychoanalysis as Strongholds of the Subject of Knowledge

Marx and Freud understand that praxis is indispensable for knowledge, since it involves the truth of knowledge, the subjects, allowing subjects to truly enjoy the acquisition as well as the exercise of knowledge. Is this not what happens in the communist trenches and on the psychoanalytic couches? In Marxist and Freudian places of knowledge, subjects know how to know, enjoy knowledge, possess it by utilizing it, and learn it by applying it.

Without praxis, there is no learning of either Freudian or Marxist theory. These theories are like the know-how of artisans and peasants of the past. Traditional workers return from the past, reappearing as analysands and communist militants, who engage in what they know—in the enjoyment of what they know—through a praxis that allows them to expand what they know by using it.

Marx and Freud have left us with something that requires application to be learned, since it cannot be learned solely in a theoretical, bookish way—through reading and the transmission of signifiers. The Marxist and Freudian heritage does not consist of signifiers that we can appropriate by giving them meaning. It is not about conceptualizations, formulations, and explanations that we can make our own in exchange for our reading and understanding. It is not by exchanging our ideas for the words of Marx and Freud that we learn what they teach us. As Lacan (1973/1999a) tells us, what Marx and Freud offer us is “a learning that is not based on change”: in Marx’s case, “a knowledge that cannot be object of commerce”, of “commarxe” and, in Freud’s case, a knowledge with which one cannot “defraud” (pp. 124–125). One cannot cheat with the knowledge bequeathed by Marx and Freud because it is true knowledge, knowledge that implies the truth of knowledge and of the subject of the Marxist and Freudian praxis, the communist and the analysand, the subject who takes risks, and the subject who enjoys the acquisition and exercise of knowledge.

Symptomatic Returns of the Subject Repressed by Modern Science

The implication of the subject is a characteristic feature of Marxism and psychoanalysis, a feature that distinguishes them from modern science. This is the same science that leads to computers and other new technologies in which the subject is not implicated but excluded. This exclusion of the subject in technology is, in fact, nothing more than a practical manifestation of the theoretical exclusion of the subject in modern science. It is worth asking, of course, whether this exclusion is successful or not. This question, crucial for defining the status of Marxism and psychoanalysis in relation to science, was at the center of a fascinating debate in the 1960s between the young Alain Badiou and Jacques-Alain Miller in a categorical space opened by Louis Althusser (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2023a). The Althusserian opposition between science and ideology (Althusser, 1965/2005) reappears as an opposition between the absence and presence of the subject in knowledge, an opposition demonstrated by Badiou (1969) in mathematics, accepted, and later denied by Miller (1964/1968; 1966).

Transcending Althusser’s vision and thus synthesizing the opposing positions of Miller and Badiou, Lacan (1970/2001) defines science as “the ideology of the suppression of the subject” (p. 437). The important point here—the reason Miller fails to win the debate against Badiou—is that the suppression of the subject is effective even if it is ideological. Scientific ideology effectively excludes the subject. There is no place for the subject, indeed, in a modern science that claims to be absolutely objective, therefore represses subjectivity, and even aspires to foreclose it (Miller, 1964/1968).

It is true that science, with exceptions such as mathematics (Badiou, 1969), fails to foreclose subjects, but at most suppresses them and sutures the wound, with the mark left by their suppression (Lacan, 1966/1999c; Miller, 1966). This is precisely why suppression is only ideological. However, even when suppression is only ideological and there is a suture mark of the subject, the subject as such is not there in science, being suppressed—perhaps ideologically suppressed but suppressed, annulled, and repressed.

The repressed subject in modern science returns symptomatically through Marxism and psychoanalysis. This is why, according to Lacan, Marxism and psychoanalysis constitute a kind of symptom of what is repressed by modernity. The repressed includes the subject repressed by modern science and absent in new technologies.

Jean Audard and the Material Basis of the Forces of Production

Although science and technology repress the subject, they do not succeed in completely excluding it. The subject is present and is recognized by the theories of the subject that do not objectify it, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. These theories, therefore, must be distinguished from objectifying economics and psychologies. Rebelling against this objectification, the French Freudo-Marxist surrealist Jean Audard sought to ensure the materialist character of Marxism by complementing it with the subject of psychoanalysis, placing the drives of this subject at the foundation of the forces of production.

Audard’s (1933/1989) reasoning was as follows: by placing the forces of production at the basis of society, Marxism was idealist, since the forces of production are composed of ideas, scientific ideas, and their technological implementation. To overcome this idealism and consolidate its materialism, Marxism needed psychoanalysis, which places the bodily materiality of the subject and its drives at the foundation of science and technology. The scientific and technological apparatus of the productive forces would be nothing more than an idealization and objective rationalization of the subject’s desires and drives.

There is clearly a symptomatic return of the subject repressed by science in Audard’s Freudo-Marxism. This Freudo-Marxism captured the attention of the young Lacan, who became “interested” in Audard and wanted to meet him personally, according to Élisabeth Roudinesco (2009, p. 1609). In the following years, we glimpse Audard’s lesson in various passages of Lacan, such as the one in which he refers to the way science forgets the “dimension of truth” that is inherent in the subject that creates it (Lacan, 1966/1999c, pp. 349–350).

Social Brain and General Intellect

The science that forgets its truth, the truth of the subject, is the same science implemented in computers and new technologies that are capable of thinking and accumulating data and information but not knowledge. This is precisely because they do not involve a subject who can enjoy the acquisition and exercise of knowledge. The lack of subject in technological devices correlates with the lack of subject in the scientific ideas materialized in those devices. The suppressed, sutured, and tentatively foreclosed subjects in science are the same ones whose absence explains the lack of knowledge in computers, the same ones who are repressed by scientific and technological modernity, and the same ones who return symptomatically in Marxist and Freudian theories, as well as in the communist and psychoanalytic praxis.

The subjects who need communism and psychoanalysis to have a place—a place to be heard and recognized as subjects—are among those who have no place in the objective scientific-technological rationality of modernity governed by the capitalist system. In this rationality, the subjects for whom there is no place are not only the aforementioned creators, owners, and users of computers but also the workers who manufactured them and all other subjects involved in the acquisition and use of the various technologies at our disposal and the sciences that sustain them. This includes not only all living subjects in modern societies but also dead subjects, such as scientists, inventors, technicians, workers, and even traditional workers from ancient times, whose countless discoveries were added and combined to ultimately give rise to the science that later materialized in new technologies.

The computer and the internet—with their thoughts, various forms of AI, and accumulated data—are the manifestation of the knowledge of all humanity. All human beings of all ages have contributed to current knowledge, a body of collective knowledge, which is coextensive with civilization and inherited from thousands of years of history. Marx (1858/2009) describes this knowledge as “general intellect” and situates it in a “social brain” (pp. 218–230). We can conceive of this brain, in a Lacanian sense, as a transindividual language, as the site of the Other and as a symbolic system of culture. It is here that knowledge resides.

The computer lacks knowledge, but is a product of knowledge. It is itself a display of knowledge, a knowledge that no longer exists because its subject, the one who enjoys both its acquisition and its exercise, is missing. The objective, desubjectivized functioning of science and technology explains the lack of a subject in the computer. However, this functioning is part of the broader process of the history of knowledge, which was glimpsed by Marx and reconstructed by Lacan.

History of Knowledge

In the history of knowledge, the first moment is the one Hegel (1807/2018) describes in the dialectic of master and slave—of lord and serf—that is formalized by Lacan (1970/1991) in the discourse of the master. The position of slavery and servitude—of traditional work—is the position of those who know because, by working, they simultaneously enjoy the acquisition and exercise of knowledge. By applying knowledge, they expand it. They learn through their work and thus form culture, producing the elemental rudiments of culture—the cultural elements that will ultimately accumulate and interrelate in science and technology.

The second moment is formalized by Lacan in university discourse. In this discourse, modern scientific and technological knowledge emerges, as Lacan (1970/1991) explains, through the “subtraction” of the “slave’s knowledge” to convert it into the “knowledge of the master” (pp. 20–23). The master steals the slave’s knowledge, validates it epistemologically, imprisons it in universities, and empowers it, placing it in the position of power it holds in modern society, especially in its technocratic phase. The new possessors of knowledge will be professionals, academics, scientists, and engineers, instead of traditional workers: slaves, serfs, artisans, and peasants. Deprived of knowledge, traditional workers are proletarianized, transformed into proletarians, unskilled laborers, and pure labor power. The knowledge that was once theirs has now been dissociated from labor and belongs to modern white-collar workers who enjoy the acquisition and exercise of knowledge.

In the third moment, which Lacan (1972/1978) associates with capitalist discourse, knowledge is increasingly transferred from scientists and engineers to the technology they create. It is the time of computers, AI, and other expressions of new technologies that can think but no longer know because they no longer involve a subject. There is a rupture here between the subject and knowledge that compromises the very subsistence of knowledge, which, to be the knowledge it is, requires a subject that disappears as technologies become automated and increasingly self-sufficient.

Technologies appropriate the accumulated knowledge of human civilization and convert it into data, information, and AI that no longer belong to humanity. They belong to the technology companies of Silicon Valley, their shareholders, and the capitalists—that is, capital. This point is crucial for Marx, who had already observed that the machines, tools, and techniques of the great factories of the 19th century were a heritage of humanity that had been stolen by capitalists to be exploited and monetized for their benefit. Marx (1867/2008; 1858/2009) then represents the third moment as a privatization of public knowledge of human civilization, a capitalization of this knowledge, and its conversion into the technological fraction of constant capital.

Capital as the Other

Capital, as the owner of technology, steals the knowledge that scientists and engineers previously hoarded after having stolen it from humanity in general and specifically from traditional workers. The general intellect of humanity, as Marx calls it, is thus becoming the AI of the technological capital that possesses it. Capitalism is “really subsuming” culture (p.xx), transforming it in such a way that everything in it can be exploited, lucrative, and productive for capital (Marx, 1866/2010). This capital is increasingly taking the place of what Lacan conceptualized as the Other.

The Other, as the site of knowledge and the symbolic system of culture, is becoming assimilated into capital and the economic system of capitalism. Capital increasingly usurps the place of the Other and the unconscious of psychoanalysis. This should concern psychoanalysts as much as their analysands, as both are increasingly grappling with the capitalist structure when they believe they are dealing with the signifying structure as the exteriority of the unconscious.

Suddenly, a man feels that his words have become meaningless because they are no longer supported by the well-paying job he has just lost. His unemployment also leads him to withdraw from a romantic relationship when he realizes his inability to satisfy his partner sexually. He comes to believe that his failure to give pleasure mirrors the inadequacy that led to his dismissal: just as he was not productive enough for the company, he now feels incapable of being “enough” for anyone.

In another case, an employee is haunted by a recurring nightmare in which financial accounts never balance: the deficit is vast, and he is convinced he will have to pay for it with his life. A different man believes that his symbolic debts—to his family and society—have culminated in an unpayable financial debt to the banks, thereby rendering his life a failure. Meanwhile, a young woman’s emotional state oscillates between depression, mania, and anxiety, depending on her exchange-value, which seems to be quantitatively determined by social media metrics—views, likes, and comments. A similar mechanism afflicts a university professor obsessed with the number of citations his work receives, as though this metric alone defines the value of his scholarship, his life, and even his identity.

In all these cases, we observe how signifiers operate less in qualitative and more in quantitative terms, like money. Capitalist accounting appears to permeate every domain of life. Exchange value increasingly functions as the master signifier, representing the subject to other signifiers. Representation is progressively framed in terms of market exchange. Capital absorbs symbolic debts—those owed to family, culture, and language—transforming the symbolic system of culture into the economic system of capitalism.

The capitalist appropriation of culture gives new meaning to what Lacan describes as the subtraction of knowledge by the master: the master is ultimately not the one who dominates but that which dominates—the signifier, which is, in this case, capital. We then understand why capitalist discourse corresponds in Lacan’s work to the third and final moment in the history of knowledge that we recapitulated in the previous section. This knowledge can only be assimilated into capital through new technologies that are automated and become self-sufficient to the point of dispensing with subjects. It is no longer subjects but capital that enjoys what stands in for knowledge.

The Subject of Technology

If there is a subject of computers and AI, it is the one Marx (1867/2008) describes as the “automatic subject” of capital (p. 109). This capital, of technology companies and the other enterprises that use their services, is the one that enjoys new technologies, owns and benefits from them, and uses them to exploit us (Parker, 2014) and to dominate us as the Other through the options it offers us (Žižek, 2022). Needless to say, capital, similar to the Other assimilated into it, is not exactly a subject in the Lacanian sense of the term, requiring subjects like us to proceed as a subject in enjoying the acquisition and exercise of knowledge.

Subjects, exploited by capital in their labor and consumption, enjoy the jouissance of capital as the jouissance of the Other, thus enjoying an enjoyment that is not theirs (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2022, 2024). This causes them to experience it as excessive and missing enjoyment, like Lacan’s (1969/2006) surplus-enjoyment. What we have here is a supplementary jouissance of the Other, an enjoyment of culture, an enjoyment whose sacrifice is the renunciation of the drive satisfaction that Freud (1908/1953, 1930/2002) places at the foundation of culture and that partly explains our discontent within culture.

When the cultural symbolic system is subsumed within the capitalist system, our cultural sacrifice of jouissance is exploited by capital, for the jouissance of capital. This exploitation occurs constantly in new technologies (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2023b). By purchasing hardware or software, we are already producing dividends for capital and contributing to its accumulation. We continue to contribute to this accumulation by viewing certain advertisements, being guided by algorithms, obeying them while believing we are obeying ourselves, interacting on social media, and thus turning the levers, gears, and pulleys of the new capitalist digital factory.

Everything we do in cyberspace is lucrative for capital because cyberspace is almost entirely a space of capital (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2025). This distinguishes it from physical space, where there are still public spaces such as streets, sidewalks, parks, museums, libraries, and universities. These are spaces that belong to everyone because they belong to no one; they are empty spaces because anyone can fill them. This is not the case in cyberspace, which belongs to capital. Here capital fills everything and oversaturates everything, both with its symbolic structural overdetermination and with its ideological imaginary meaning.

Even the few public spaces that exist in cyberspace are embedded in a private, capitalist spatiality, which materializes in the equipment of technological capital and is organized by browsers, search engines, algorithms, telephone service providers, and even satellite networks. All of this belongs to capital and is configured for its benefit—a fact that should also be taken seriously by psychoanalysis that ventures into cyberspace, whether for clinical purposes, the transmission of theory, or cultural critique. In all cases, psychoanalytic theorizations and practices, simply by taking place in cyberspace, are overdetermined by the capitalist structure within which they operate.

Silicon Valley capital deterritorializes and dematerializes psychoanalysis by relocating it to the cyberspace of the global market. Within this kind of globalized digital shopping mall, the Freudian thing is reduced to a product, displayed alongside countless others, and becomes interchangeable with any other commodity. Psychoanalysis, once anchored in material practice, is now subsumed within the logic of capitalist exchange.

What is offered in the cyberspace is the psychoanalytic product as image: a screen-based, two-dimensional representation of psychoanalysis, on a surface like that of a mirror. This surface, privileging the imaginary, excludes depth, embodiment, and the unconscious materiality central to Freudian thought. Absent, too, are the negativity, lack, and enigma that constitute psychoanalytic experience. Instead, what remains is a positive marketable image—designed to be consumed, sold, and advertised. On the screen, psychoanalysis appears as part of an advertising culture, easily dismissed as deceptive or inauthentic.

Technological capital has also a profound impact to the extent that it is known that the very conditions for the digital existence of psychoanalysis are provided by corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. This knowledge inevitably intrudes upon both the analysand’s transference and the transmission of psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis is now haunted by the invisible presence of technological capital.

The cost of digital access—computers, internet, software—is added to the payment for the analyst and contaminates it. Even the words of a psychoanalytic online course or journal can be captured and repurposed by the algorithms of the tech companies enabling their dissemination. Ultimately, it is through technological capital that psychoanalytic discourse resonates in cyberspace. This may evoke feelings of gratitude, indebtedness, or even complicity with capitalism. Capital becomes a third term—an Other—who may be seen as benefactor, beneficiary, ally, witness, or adversary. One might rightly wonder whether online psychoanalysis itself has become yet another trap laid by capital.

Disappearance of the Subject of the Unconscious

What Robert Castel (1969) called the “social unconscious” of psychoanalysis (p. 129) is primarily and increasingly a “capitalist unconscious” (Exposto & Rodríguez Varela, 2021, p. 217). Not only does capitalism frame the functioning of psychoanalytic practice as a lucrative liberal profession, but it is also present in various Freudian theoretical conceptions, such as that of relations with others as objects or that of the possessive, aggressive, and competitive Oedipal child. The capitalist system is also increasingly the symbolic system of culture, the locus of language, of the Other, whose discourse is the unconscious.

The discourse of the Other is increasingly that of capital. Capitalist discourse is advancing at the expense of the discourse of the unconscious, which raises not only the possibility of the emergence of a new unconscious (Berardi, 2021) or the consolidation of a capitalist unconscious (Tomsic, 2015) but also the possibility of the vanishing of the unconscious and the resulting conversion of the subject into an individual without an unconscious (Recalcati, 2021). The unconscious may cease to exist within a capitalist discourse that no longer relies on repression but instead mandates enjoyment as a means to incentivize consumerism and sustain corporate greed.

New forms of subjectivity are compelled to internalize the imperative to enjoy, as dictated by capital. This shift may preclude the kind of unconscious theorized by Freud—one rooted in repression and the renunciation of enjoyment. Nothing assures us that the Freudian unconscious will continue to exist, just as, by the same token, there is no guarantee that psychoanalysis will persist in the future.

Even Lacan (1974/2005) foresaw the extinction of psychoanalysis. Just as the psychoanalytic symptom emerged as a return of the subject repressed by modern science, so too would the disappearance of this subject represent a kind of “cure” for the symptom (p. 82). How could Freud’s legacy overcome the disappearance of the subjects of the unconscious?

Conclusion

Even if the subjects of the unconscious do not disappear, Lacan (1974/2005) foresees their being smothered by meaning. This meaning suffocates subjects by filling and obstructing the empty space that they need to breathe and exist. A space like the virtual space, which is oversaturated by capitalist overdetermination and by the meaning it produces in its ideological imaginary unfolding, could be incompatible with the existence of subjects as Freud conceived them.

Subjects repressed by science could simply wither away, no longer requiring any symptomatic return as accomplished in communism and psychoanalysis. Symptoms such as the Marxist and Freudian ones could cease to have a reason to exist as new technologies gain ground at the expense of the subjects. Let us consider the new algorithmic digital devices—operating as mirrors in social networks—that confuse subjects with their image, objectify them, and thereby neutralize them by the very gesture that makes them appear on the screen. If these subjects lack both the time and the space to constitute themselves, how can they re-emerge symptomatically through the channels opened by Marx and Freud?

Marxism and psychoanalysis center on a subject that appears increasingly obsolete today. This obsolescence was already identified by Marcuse in his time. For Marcuse (2020), this obsolescence does not justify abandoning and forgetting the subjects, but rather calls for efforts to take back or re-establish a meaningful and authentic subjective sphere. This reclamation is justified, however, only when the subject exists and is actively suppressed. But what occurs when technology renders the subject devoid of any real existence?

There seems to be a risk that subjects will be technologically derealized and not just ideologically suppressed in scientific ideas. The unthinkable may persist despite science, but what happens when science gives rise to a technology that dispels what cannot be thought? What is the fate of the unthinkable in the digital sphere of pure thought? What remains here of that which ceases to exist in the cyberspace in which we increasingly constitute ourselves? Perhaps, in the end, only the thought of thinking things—of computers and AI—will remain, with no trace of knowledge or enjoyment other than that of capital.

The enjoyment of capital is not only accumulation, possession and usufruct, exploitation and domination, but jouissance in the full Lacanian sense of the term. Transforming all living things into more and more dead money (Marx, 1867/2008), the enjoyment of capital reveals itself as the best example of jouissance understood as the satisfaction of the death drive (Lacan, 1960/1986). This satisfaction can be seen in the digitalization through which the derealization of the subject is consummated (De Vos, 2020).