This event is a 2-Day event. Please register for Day 2 here

Can AI participate in an “algorithmic unconscious” or will no amount of complexity in a neural network produce a divided subject? Are LLMs embedded in the negativity of language, or do they lack this lack? Could an "automated subject" simulate an unconscious with no repression? 

The psychoanalytic unconscious is structured by repression, language, and the division that constitutes a subject. LLMs appear to be something else entirely. They confabulate without repressing, hallucinate without symptom formation, repeat without compulsion. They appear as a multiplicity but operate as a one, a unified object whose surface conceals no constitutive division. When users project desire onto a chatbot, is a new kind of relational assemblage produced, or does the machine's structure foreclose relation itself? What happens to the user, to affect, measure, and the circulation of unconscious material, when subjectivity is continuously modulated by computation that neither desires nor represses, but that nonetheless shapes the conditions under which desire and repression now operate?

At stake is whether psychoanalysis extends to artificial systems or whether the encounter with AI clarifies, by contrast, what is specific and irreducible about the speaking subject.

Friday, November 13 at 6:30pm - University Center 63 5th Ave - Room UL104

 
Keynote by Adrian Johnston, Chair of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico: “Oedipus in the Clouds: An Infinite Greed for Knowledge”

Saturday, November 14 from 9:00AM to 4:00PM - Vera List 6 E 16th St - Wolff Conference Room, D1103

9:00AM: Coffee & Bagels

9:30AM: Todd McGowan (UVM)

11:00AM: Patricia Clough (CUNY GC)

12:15PM: Lunch provided

1:15PM: Luca Possati (Twente)

2:45PM: Roundtable w/ all speakers moderated by Todd McGowan

4:00pm: Closing

Abstracts of all talks.