Hystericizing Capitalist Discourse on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The paper explores the complex relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cap- italist ideology through Lacan’s fifth discourse: The Discourse of the Capitalist. It argues that AI confronts the subject as a master signifier (S1), shaping subjectivity, regulating desire, and reinforcing the capitalist symbolic order. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of the four discourses and the three registers of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real, the study lays out a theoretical cartography of alienation, jouissance, and ideology — perpetuated and intensified through the deployment of artificial systems. AI-driven “innovations” exploit the subject’s constitutive lack by positioning themselves as solutions to existential dissatisfaction, thereby embedding the capitalist imperative of consumption as the desire of the Other. The paper offers a hystericized discourse on AI as a psychoanalytic counter- measure; a mode of resistance that attempts to reveal the ruptures within the symbolic order opening the possibility for an ethical reevaluation of AI’s role in structuring the (algorithmic) unconscious.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.61439/LKJH7654