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FOREIGN OBJEKT

Isabel Millar: Three Body Problem: Can the San-Ti Speak?

Updated: Jul 30

Intelligence-Love-Revolution Symposium

Isabel Millar: Three Body Problem: Can the San-Ti Speak?

August 10, at 10 am Pacific Time


The acronym TESCREAL, coined and disseminated by philosopher Émile P. Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru in 2023, circumscribes and critiques various interrelated approaches to the future of Artificial Intelligence and space travel expounded by the usual parade of overconfident white men of a certain age with a penchant for eugenicist ideas with a “happy ending”. It stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective-Altruism and Long-termism. It also captures and delineates what we could otherwise describe as the phallic enjoyment of technocapitalism, or simply, as Lacan put it, the jouissance of the idiot. What they all have in common is something which psychoanalysis recognizes all too well: the (always-already thwarted) desire for the augmented human – the organism completely fulfilled, bursting with vitality, pleasure and potentiality at all times. In short, a total body. But this is a fantasy propped up and perpetuated by countless fictional depictions of the future, fantasies which often forgo many fascinating psychological and conceptual aspects of these imagined worlds. Netflix’s adaptation of Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem being just one recent example of how phallic fantasies of AI and other non-human forms of intelligence, obscure the psychoanalytic and philosophical complexity of how the human subject (or speaking-being) copes with the potential, not just of other intelligences but also how this implies our whole relationship to time and space.


Readings/Resources

Benioff, D, Weiss, D.B, Woo, W. (Creators) (2024) Three Body Problem, Netflix.

Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore - On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973. London WW Norton & Company

Lacan, J. (2006). 'The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud', in Ecrits. London: WW Norton & Company

Lacan, J. (2006) Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty' in Ecrits. London: WW Norton & Company

Lacan, J. (2006) 'Science and Truth' in Ecrits. London: WW Norton & Company

Liu, C. (2014) The Three Body Problem. London: Head of Zeus Ltd.

Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press


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