Psychoanalysis
GCAS Review Journal
Vol. III, September 2026
Editor: Florian Kleinau
EDITOR’S NOTE
There once was a time in which planet Earth was inhabited by a species named homo sapiens. This species, barbaric as it was, dwelt in every place on this planet. It cultivated Earth’s soil, sailed across all of its waters, and even flew through the skies. Homo sapiens is said to have had strange interests, like collecting seashells or competing for resources. In fact, there are myths saying that homo sapiens had a spark of intelligence in them.
There once was a time in which humans had to labour. In which we broke our backs for bread, in which we wrote letters by hand and waited weeks for answers that might never come. In which a doctor pressed his ear to your chest and guessed. In which a teacher looked you in the eye and lied, but at least had the decency to sweat while doing it. There once was a time in which we had to sit with our own silence long enough for something to happen in it.
There once was a time in which planet earth existed — or so I’ve heard.
Was there time once?
When I put out the call for this special issue, I did not specify what this special issue was supposed to be on. All I was hoping for was students or former students getting together to write — on psychoanalysis, preferably, but not necessarily. And then again, what does that even mean — on psychoanalysis.
As expected, the papers collected here are not a coherent statement. They do not follow a unified position. However, what struck me the most was how — without any effort — all submissions somehow ended up dealing with the same question: that of the subject in the changing cultural and technical landscape.
In this sense, the papers will probably be outdated by the time this is published. The world is changing by the minute now, it seems. From the time the call for papers was put out to this issue being published, the world literally saw wars start and end.
So as unconnected as the contributions are, they do seem to converge on something we might think of as the spirit of our time. Maybe spirit is the wrong word — or maybe not. It may be precisely the right word in so far as it is an evil spirit, a spirit that frightens us, that haunts us and scares us to death. This question and this time calls us to reconsider ourselves on a scale larger than the academy. It acts like a mirror that is somehow opaque enough to reflect anything but clear enough in its reflectivity to shatter the assumptions we have of ourselves.
Some of the most rational people I have talked to over the past months — students, friends, family, business partners — have clearly told me that the world will end soon. That the human race will be history in a few years.
The papers collected in this issue do not account for such scenarios. If you are looking for answers on artificial intelligence, on the question of the subject, on what it means to speak or to be spoken to, you will be disappointed. What you will find instead is a set of fractures — seven attempts to say something about a situation that resists being said. The fractures do not align. And that is, I think, the point.
The situation is this: The machines speak. Not well, not badly — they speak. They produce language at a scale and speed that renders the question of authorship, of origin, of who-is-speaking, almost quaint. What the papers in this issue share — and what I want to mark before the reader enters them — is a refusal. They refuse to treat artificial intelligence as a problem to be solved, a risk to be managed, an ethics case to be adjudicated. Not because these questions are unimportant. But because they are — and I choose this word carefully — boring. They are boring because they assume what is actually at stake: that we know what a subject is, that we know what intelligence is, that we know what language does when it leaves a mouth or a processor.
What is missing in all of this?
What is missing is a confrontation with the possibility that none of this matters. Not in the nihilistic sense — but in the sense that asking what does it mean to be a subject in the age of artificial intelligence may be the wrong question. It may be wrong because it assumes that the age determines the question. It assumes that something has changed or something must change.
What if nothing has changed? Perhaps the machines have merely made visible what was always the case: that what we think of as us is a fiction maintained by violence, that language does not belong to us, that meaning is not something we produce but something that occasionally, catastrophically, produces us.
Whatever the revolution ahead of us makes of these questions, let it be noted that they were asked. That there were people who sat alone in rooms and wrestled with language until something cracked open. That they did not always succeed — and that the cracks were the point.
Florian Kleinau