Artificial intelligence and the disavowal of castration

This article develops a Lacanian account of artificial intelligence as a contemporary symbolic formation through which lack, authority, and desire are reorganised. It argues that AI does not simply introduce new technical risks, nor does it merely extend existing debates about transparency, bias, and regulation. Rather, it increasingly occupies the place of an unbarred Other: a locus of address imagined to know without uncertainty, respond without division, and stabilise meaning without remainder. Drawing on Lacanian concepts of castration, jouissance, foreclosure, and the barred Other, the article shows how AI-mediated discourse can obscure the signs through which symbolic limitation ordinarily appears. Its fluent, available, and procedurally opaque outputs may convert non-knowledge into technical insufficiency, uncertainty into iterative demand, and coherence into the semblance of warrant. In this configuration, the problem is not that AI eliminates lack, but that it renders lack less visible, relocating it into opacity, system failure, and user responsibility. The article therefore reframes AI ethics as a question of symbolic mediation: how authority is authorised, how desire is routed, and how belief remains open to contestation. It concludes by arguing for a castrated relation to AI, one that refuses both technological rejection and oracle-like belief, and preserves fallibility, delay, and non-knowledge as conditions of interpretation, subjectivity, and clinical thought.