In one of the recent 'corporate nightmare' thrillers, The Virtual Boss, a company is actually (and unbeknownst to the employees) run by a computer that suddenly 'runs amok', grows beyond control and starts to implement measures against the top managers (it instigates conflicts among them, gives orders for them to be fired, etc.); finally, it sets in motion a deadly plot against its own programmer.... The 'truth' of this plot is that a Master is, in a sense, always virtual--a contingent person who fills out a preordained place in the structure, while the game is actually run by the 'big Other' qua impersonal symbolic machine. This is what a Master is forced to take note of via the experience of 'subjective destitution': that he is by definition an imposter, an imbecile who misperceives as the outcome of his decisions what actually ensues from the automatic run of the symbolic machine.
And ultimately, the same holds for every subject: in his autobiography, Althusser writes that he has been persecuted all his adult life by the notion that he does not exist, by the fear that others will become aware of his non-existence--that is, of the fact that he is an imposter who is only pretending to exist. His great fear after the publication of Reading Capital, for example, was that some perspicacious critic would reveal the scandalous fact that the main author of this book does not exist....
In a sense, this is what psychoanalysis is about: the psychoanalytic cure is effectively over when the subject loses this fear and freely assumes his own non-existence. Thus psychoanalysis is the exact opposite of subjectivist solipsism: in contrast to the notion that I can be absolutely certain only of the ideas in my own mind, whereas the existence of reality outside myself is already an inconclusive inference, psychoanalysis claims that reality outside myself definitely exists; the problem, rather, is that I myself do not exist....
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