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Abstract

For Lacan, guilt arises in the sublimation of ab-sens (non-sense) into the symbolic comprehension of sen-absexe (sense without sex, sense in the deficiency of sexual relation), or in the maturation of language to sensibility through the effacement of sex. Though, as Slavoj Žižek himself points out in a recent article regarding ChatGPT, the split subject always misapprehends the true reason for guilt’s manifestation, such guilt at best provides a sort of evidence for the inclusion of the subject in the order of language, acting as a necessary, even enjoyable mark of the subject’s coherence (or, more importantly, the subject’s separation from incoherence/ab-sens). For Žižek, the perversity (père-versity) of artificially intelligent chatbots lies precisely here, in their appearance as evidently novel modes for enjoying the displacement of one’s guilt onto the intelligent machine (“what happens is a form of perverse disavowal: knowing full well that it was the machine, not me, that did the work, I can enjoy it as my own,” Žižek 2023). What Žižek misses is that the transferred belovedness of guilt is a figure of contemporary life in general–the reason for modernity’s endless reproduction–and the AI chatbot is only one more recent, particularly popular, expression of racial capital’s entanglement with the unconscious. In our work, we will discuss the relationship between guilty affects, love, (cultural) reproduction, and AI using reference to Lacan’s later works, critical data science studies, and Black radical criticism.

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