From Subject to Project: Flusser, Lacan, and the AI Transformation of Being
This paper explores the transformation of subjectivity by staging a dialogue between Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the subject—understood as the subject of the unconscious—and Vilém Flusser's concept of the projekt, extending this dialogue into the contemporary landscape of artificial intelligence and technical images. Lacan conceives the subject as fundamentally split, constituted through language, desire, and the symbolic order; Flusser, meanwhile, redefines the human as a “project” embedded within technical apparatuses and programmed systems. Read together, these two frameworks unsettle the notion of autonomous subjectivity, recasting agency as mediated, contingent, and structurally constrained. In the age of artificial intelligence, the nature and function of technical images call for renewed critical scrutiny. Building on Flusser’s account of technical images as apparatus-generated abstractions, this paper examines how AI-generated images transform the epistemological and ontological status of visual media. Produced through algorithmic processes with minimal direct human intervention, these images intensify Flusser's concerns about the erosion of historical narrative, while also demanding a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity, desire, and representation. Drawing on Lacanian theory, the paper analyzes AI-generated images as mediators between the Imaginary and the Symbolic that simultaneously brush against the Real, where jouissance surfaces as excess and disruption beyond symbolization. Such images participate in the formation of the subject of the unconscious and structure new configurations of desire. The algorithmic image thus operates as a mirror that both reflects and constructs the gaze—no longer exclusively human, but machinic, distributed, and operationalized through code.