Lacanian Anti-Humanism and Freedom

Abstract

This chapter reconsiders the much-maligned notion of full speech in Lacanian theory and how Lacan’s discussions of machines and cybernetic systems provide new ways of thinking about it. If this early model for the ethic of psychoanalysis is looked at more closely, along with its unexpected connection to the nonhuman, we get a portrait of anti- or posthumanist freedom and agency. The question remains whether freedom and agency in Lacan’s work significantly changes the classical models of freedom (i.e., voluntarist or libertarian) or simply places these models in a different source—no longer in the humanist subject, but in something else. This chapter explores whether Lacan’s position involves the same kind of problem found in Heidegger’s work: a kind of mystical quietism.