Abstract

Commenting on the role of psychoanalysis at the time of the posthuman, Véronique Voruz notes dryly that “posthumanismposthumanism is a discourse that brings people together in a conversation where nobody knows what the other is saying, but everyone believes they understand each other to a sufficient degree for a conversation to take place”. “Posthumanismposthumanism” is both symptom and signifiersignifier and thus organizes a social bondsocial bond, at least between academics where the jouissancejouissance or pleasure of discourse compensates for the lacklack of meaning. This is both fortunate and ironic because one of the features of posthumanismposthumanism is precisely the decline and even absence of traditional forms of social bondsocial bond, that is to say those organized by signifiers. In this era of planetary-scale technology, the social bondsocial bond is pre-eminently mediated by objects organized in informationinformation networks. The posthuman “internet of things” provides the paradigm of communicationcommunication in which everything is “chipped” and rendered equivalent: humans, animalsanimal and machines. All are objects that relay readable datadata leaving open the question of whether there is another face to these objects that is unreadable, and whose register therefore in psychoanalytic terms would not be meaning but jouissancejouissance.