Externatus rejects the impossible; their digital metalanguage is all-encompassing. This new absence of limits raises the question of symbolism: if nothing is lacking, why would there be any need to represent it? In the society of individuals, each person becomes self-contained—no longer dependent on others (the end of alterity), no longer subject to any unappropriable superiority (the end of authority), no longer legitimized by lineage or tradition (the end of antecedence). The individual now struggles to psychically nourish themself from a digitalized supersocial that outperforms yet cannot be internalized. Rather than being guided by internalized values, people’s existence is regulated by an external apparatus. Psychoanalysts are raising concerns: without social signals that mark the necessity of boundaries, fluidity leads to non-separation, a lack of distinction that affects the psychic economy and may even disrupt it. To understand these concerns, this chapter returns to the central role Jacques Lacan assigned to the differentiation of psychic registers (the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary), the subject’s psyche being structured by words (signifiers). This underscores the crucial role of language, especially in light of the challenges posed by a social world where the dominant metalanguage is no longer verbal, but digital.

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The Psychic Mechanisms of Social Desymbolization

  • Pierre Beckouche

摘要

Externatus rejects the impossible; their digital metalanguage is all-encompassing. This new absence of limits raises the question of symbolism: if nothing is lacking, why would there be any need to represent it? In the society of individuals, each person becomes self-contained—no longer dependent on others (the end of alterity), no longer subject to any unappropriable superiority (the end of authority), no longer legitimized by lineage or tradition (the end of antecedence). The individual now struggles to psychically nourish themself from a digitalized supersocial that outperforms yet cannot be internalized. Rather than being guided by internalized values, people’s existence is regulated by an external apparatus. Psychoanalysts are raising concerns: without social signals that mark the necessity of boundaries, fluidity leads to non-separation, a lack of distinction that affects the psychic economy and may even disrupt it. To understand these concerns, this chapter returns to the central role Jacques Lacan assigned to the differentiation of psychic registers (the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary), the subject’s psyche being structured by words (signifiers). This underscores the crucial role of language, especially in light of the challenges posed by a social world where the dominant metalanguage is no longer verbal, but digital.