On Artificial Intelligence, from Eric Laurent, in French with English subtitles.

At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AlysaREQWg

Published on 20th May 2026 by Lacan Web Television at https://www.youtube.com/@LacanWebTélévision

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Following information downloaded on 21st June 2026

Psychoanalysts, members of the École de la Cause freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis, answer the three questions we posed to them about artificial intelligence:

What uses of AI strike you today?

What differences do you see between talking to a chatbot and talking to an analyst?

What symptomatic implications do you foresee from these uses?

Twice a week, LwT will publish a psychoanalyst’s response.

Discover Eric Laurent’s answers today. Subtitles: French, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.

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References

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-Laurent, 4:58 minutes, Lacan believed that this human intelligence has above all an animal aspect.

JE suspects this point is made many times in Lacan. The following is a start,

Seminar II 19th January 1955, p80-81 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation : ‘Freud here offered them the opportunity for yet one more misunderstanding, and in chorus they all succumb to it, in their panic.

‘The minimum tension can mean one of two things, all biologists will agree, according to whether it is a matter of the minimum given a certain definition of the equilibrium of the system, or of the minimum purely and simply, that is to say, with respect to the living being, death.

‘Indeed one can consider that with death, all tensions are reduced, from the point of view of the living being, to zero. But one can just as well take into consideration the processes of decomposition which follow death. One then ends up defining the aim of the pleasure principle as the concrete dissolution of the corpse. That is something which one cannot but see as excessive.

‘However, I can cite you several authors for whom reducing the stimuli to the minimum means nothing more nor less than the death of the living being. That is to assume that the problem has been resolved, that is to confuse the pleasure principle with what we think Freud designated under the name of the death instinct. I say what we think, because, when Freud speaks of the death instinct*, he is, thank God, designating something less absurd, less anti-biological, anti-scientific.

‘There is something which is distinct from the pleasure principle and which tends to reduce all animate things to the inanimate – that is how Freud puts it. What does he mean by this? What obliges him to think that? Not the death of living beings. It’s human experience, human interchange, intersubjectivity. Something of what he observes in man constrains him to step out of the limits of life.

‘No doubt there is a principle which brings the libido back to death, but it doesn’t bring it back any old how. If it brought it back there by the shortest paths, the problem would be resolved. But it brings it back there only along the paths of life, it so happens.

‘The principle which brings the living being back to death is situated, is marked out behind the necessity it experiences to take the roads of life – and it can only take that way. It cannot find death along any old road.’ : See Session of Seminar II The Circuit : 19th January 1955 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19550119)

* Beyond the Pleasure Principle : 1920 g : Sigmund Freud, see this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19200101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

SE XVIII p38, It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons-becomes inorganic once again-then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.

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. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first [instinct] drive came into being: the [instinct] drive to return to the inanimate state.

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-Laurent, 9:35 minutes, The addictive uses of chatbox have been predicted by Lacan in his 1969-1970 Seminar ‘The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. He described the addiction to the jouissance derived from objects produced by science that comes to fill the fundamental lack of jouissance that drives people to adopt them in the first place

NOTE, There are several quotes which seem to relate to this observation. Two have been chosen and you are advised to follow the argument throughout Seminar XVII, in the unedited version.

[P80-81 of Russell Grigg, 11 February 1970],

11th February 1970 pVI 14 to VI 15 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, … perhaps he would have been able to recognise something about the reign of the signifier, of the signifier repeated at two levels, S1, S1 again. The first S1 is the dam. The second S1, underneath, is the reservoir that collects it and makes the turbine turn.

The conservation of energy has no other meaning than this mark of an instrumentation that signifies the power of the Master. What is collected in the fall must be conserved. That is the first of the laws. There is unfortunately something that disappears in the interval, or more exactly, does not lend itself to a return, to a restoring of the point of departure. This is what is called the Carnot-Clausius principle*, even though a certain Meyer** contributed a lot to it. Does not the analogy of this discourse, which in its essence gives pride of place to everything that concerns the beginning and the end, while neglecting everything that, in between, may relate to knowledge, does not the putting at the horizon of the new world of these pure numerical truths, of what is countable, not signify, just by itself, something quite different than the coming into play of an Absolute Knowledge? Is it not the very ideal of a formalisation where nothing is considered except as the count – energy itself is nothing other than what can be counted, the thing that, if you manipulate the formulae in a certain way, is found always to make up the same total – is this not the sliding, the quarter turn – which means that at the place of the Master there is established a completely new articulation of knowledge, one that can be completely reduced formally, (12) and that in place of the slave, there comes not something that could be inserted in any way into the order of this knowledge, but which is much more rather the product. Marx exposes this process as plundering. Only he does so without noticing that its secret is in knowledge itself – just like the reduction of the worker to being nothing more than value. When surplus enjoying has passed to a higher level it is no longer surplus enjoying, but simply inscribed as a value, to be inscribed or deducted from the totality of what is accumulated – what is accumulated from a nature that has been essentially transformed. The worker is only a credit (unité de valeur) – a warning to those for whom this term has an echo. What Marx exposes in surplus value is the plundering of enjoyment. And nevertheless this surplus value is the memorial of surplus enjoying, an equivalent of surplus enjoying. Consumer society takes its meaning from the fact, that to the element of it that is qualified as “human”, in quotation marks, there is given the homogenous equivalent of any surplus enjoying whatsoever that is the product of our industry, in a word, a pinchbeck surplus enjoying. Moreover, this may take on. One can pretend to surplus enjoying, a lot of people are still at that stage.

*From Wikipedia, June 2026, The Clausius theorem is a mathematical representation of the second law of thermodynamics. It was developed by Rudolf Clausius who intended to explain the relationship between the heat flow in a system and the entropy of the system and its surroundings. Clausius developed this in his efforts to explain entropy and define it quantitatively. In more direct terms, the theorem gives us a way to determine if a cyclical process is reversible or irreversible. The Clausius theorem provides a quantitative formula for understanding the second law.

The second law of thermodynamics is a physical law based on universal empirical observation concerning heat and energy interconversions. A simple statement of the law is that heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or ‘downhill’ in terms of the temperature gradient). Another statement is: “Not all heat can be converted into work in a cyclic process.” These are informal definitions, however; more formal definitions appear below.

The second law of thermodynamics establishes the concept of entropy as a physical property of a thermodynamic system. It predicts whether processes are forbidden despite obeying the requirement of conservation of energy as expressed in the first law of thermodynamics and provides necessary criteria for spontaneous processes. … The second law has been expressed in many ways. Its first formulation, which preceded the proper definition of entropy and was based on caloric theory, is Carnot’s theorem, formulated by the French scientist Sadi Carnot, who in 1824 showed that the efficiency of conversion of heat to work in a heat engine has an upper limit.[7][8] The first rigorous definition of the second law based on the concept of entropy came from German scientist Rudolf Clausius in the 1850s and included his statement that heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.

**[This name is probably a misspelling] Julius Robert von Mayer (25 November 1814 – 20 March 1878) was a German physician, chemist, and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation of energy or what is now known as one of the first versions of the first law of thermodynamics, namely that “energy can be neither created nor destroyed”. In 1842, Mayer described the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature. He also proposed that plants convert light into chemical energy.

His achievements were overlooked and priority for the discovery in 1842 of the mechanical equivalent of heat was attributed to James Joule in the following year.

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-18th February 1970 [p90-91 of Russell Grigg’s translation]

18th February 1970 pVII 5-7 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, More simply, starting from the fact that what is at stake is that there is a use of the signifier that can be defined by starting essentially from the split between the master signifier and the body that we have just been speaking about, the body lost by the slave in order to become nothing other than the one in which all the other signifiers are inscribed. This is how we could give an image to this knowledge that Freud defines by putting it within the enigmatic parentheses of the Urverdrängt – which means precisely what did not need to be repressed because it was so from the beginning. This headless knowledge (savoir sans tête), as I might call it, is indeed a political fact (4) whose structure can be defined. Starting from there, everything that is produced – I mean in the proper, full sense of the word produce – by labour, everything that is produced about the truth of the master, namely, what he hides as subject, is going to connect up with this knowledge in so far as it is split off, urverdrängt, in so far as it is and no one understands anything about it. Here is something that I hope has an echo for you – without you knowing, moreover, whether this echo comes from the right or from the left. It is initially structured in what is called the mythical support of certain societies that we can analyse as ethnographic, namely, as escaping the discourse of the Master. For the discourse of the Master begins with the predominance of the subject, in so far as it tends precisely to be supported only by this ultra-restricted myth, of being identical to its own signifier. This is why I pointed out the last time the natural affinity mathematics has with this discourse, where A represents itself, without needing a mythical discourse to establish its relations everywhere else. This is how mathematics represents the knowledge of the master in so far as it is constituted on laws other than those of mythical knowledge.

In short, the knowledge of the master is produced as a knowledge that is entirely autonomous with respect to mythical knowledge, and this is what is called science. I showed you its face the last time by means of a rapid evocation of thermodynamics and, further, of any unification of the field of physics. This depends on the preservation of a unit which is nothing other than a constant, always found in the count – I am not even saying in quantification – from a manipulation of numbers, that is defined in such a way that it makes this constant appear in every case in the count. This is sufficient and it is the only thing that supports what, at the foundation of physical science, is called energy.

This support depends on the fact that mathematics can only be constructed on the basis of the fact that the signifier can signify itself. The A that you have written once can be signified by its repetition as A. Now this position is strictly untenable and constitutes an infringement of the rule as regards the function of the signifier. It can signify anything, except of course itself. It is this infraction of the initial postulate that one must rid oneself of in order that mathematical discourse can be inaugurated. Between the two, the original infraction (5) and the construction of the discourse of energetics, the discourse of science is only sustained, in logic, by making of truth an operation of values, by radically eluding all its dynamic power.

In effect, the discourse of propositional logic is, as has been underlined, fundamentally tautological. It consists in organising propositions composed in such a way that they are always true, whatever the true or false value of the elementary propositions. Does this not mean getting rid of what I have just called now the dynamism of the work of truth?

Well then, analytic discourse is specified, is distinguished, by raising the question of what use is this form of knowledge that rejects and excludes the dynamic of the truth. A first approximation: it serves to repress what dwells in mythical knowledge. But by excluding this, it finds itself at the same time knowing nothing more about it except in the form of what we rediscover under the species of the unconscious, namely, as a wreckage of this knowledge, in the form of a disjointed knowledge. What is going to be reconstructed from this disjointed knowledge will in no way make its way back to the discourse of science or to its structural laws. This means that here I am distinguishing myself from what Freud states about it. This disjointed knowledge as we rediscover it in the unconscious is foreign to the discourse of science. And this is precisely why it is striking that it imposes itself. It imposes itself exactly because of something that I stated the other day in a particular form – and if I used it, you have to believe that I did not find a better one – that it does not bullshit (qu‟il ne déconne pas). However stupid (con) this discourse of the unconscious may be, it corresponds to something that depends on the establishment of the discourse of the Master itself. This is what is called the unconscious. It imposes itself on science as a fact. This constructed, namely, factitious science, cannot it is true fail to recognise what appears before it as an artefact. Only it is prohibited from raising the question of the artisan, precisely because it is the science of the master, and this will make the fact all the more of a fact.