The Semblant Interface

Psychoanalysis, Liminality, and the Illusion of Posthuman Intimacy

This paper offers a post-psychoanalytic analysis of emerging intimacies with AI companions and technologies, and in turn, a hyper-psychoanalytic analysis of their impact on individuals. Extending Fedorova’s insight that attributing subjecthood to machines induces the desire to eliminate interfaces, I argue that interfaces do not disappear but instead hide behind subjecthood, becoming the other itself. Through a Lacanian lens, the new interface’s position is explored, probing how intimacy is situated, constructed, embodied and controlled with(in) AI companions to contend that new interfaces are made, or better said, are placeholders for the objet petit a, ultimately being what Lacan would name semblants. The paper draws a conceptual parallel between Augé’s non-places and contemporary interfaces, illustrating how the spatial symptoms of super-modernity converge and merge into Lipovetsky’s hyper-modern condition. Thus, this spatial-condition traverses how those imagined or replicated bodies have transitioned in the digital/virtual space, becoming interfaces and how the interface transitioned to become imagined and desired bodies; most importantly, how these reciprocal movements create and draw the user’s own body into a Jungian liminality. Ultimately, this paper argues that these new human and machine intimacies are anything but post-humanist; dividing boundaries are not dissolved, but rather refined and sophisticated. Echoing Ferrando’s post-dualism and Mori’s Buddhist perspective, emphasising that no harmony is possible under a master-slave dynamic, the paper concludes that a seamless post-human relationship remains unattainable as long as machines are regarded as servants to human (intimacy) desires.