Language After the Subject: From Plato to LLMs
Introduction Plato’s dialogues begin with suspicion. Poets, according to Socrates, speak not from knowledge but from divine frenzy. In Ion , he tells the rhapsode: “You are not speaking about Homer with knowledge… you are possessed.” And in the Republic , he warns that poets deal in shadows, imitations of imitations, and should be exiled from the ideal city. Only the philosopher, guided by reason, should govern speech and thought. Yet beneath this judgment lies a deeper anxiety: the instability of the speaking subject. Who truly speaks when one speaks? Is the voice of the philosopher grounded in reason, or is all language animated by forces beyond our grasp? This question reverberates through Western thought, from the Cartesian cogito to the unconscious of Freud, from Nietzsche’s genealogies to Lacan’s linguistic subject, and finally, into the uncanny speech of large language models. Across these thresholds, the sovereign speaker dissolves. Meaning becomes a game played beh...