Return to Saussure

                                                                Las Meninas. Velázquez-Picasso     Introduction Debates over AI in writing and image-making often appear to concern technology itself. Yet beneath the surface lies a deeper struggle over authorship, authority, and the legitimacy of artistic practice. On social media, artists and writers split into two increasingly polarized camps: those who embrace AI as a tool for experimentation and those who reject it outright, sometimes refusing even to engage with anyone who uses such tools. What looks like a dispute about machines is better understood as a conflict about the cultural rules that define creativity. Here, Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the hysterical and obsessional subject, used metaphorically rather than clinically, provides a compelling len...

Introduction The divide between cultural innovation and traditional stability is visible everywhere—from the arts to politics, from aesthetics to social values. Modern democracies appear almost evenly split between those who push for transformation and those who defend inherited frameworks. This tension is hardly new, yet psychoanalytic theory offers an unexpectedly revealing lens for examining it. In particular, Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the hysterical and obsessional subject, terms referring not to pathology in the colloquial sense but to enduring psychic structures, provides a subtle way to read the contemporary landscape. Drawing from his interpretation of Freud, Jacques Lacan (as presented by Steven Z. Levine) likens the hysteric to the avant-garde artist and the obsessional subject to the academic artist. Such imagery invites a broader reflection: can these two subject positions serve as metaphors for the progressive and conservative orientations that shape cultural...