PT Journal
AU Brija, A
   Eddahbi, B
   Sallami, K
TI Psychoanalysis of artificial intelligence in Fantasia by Laura Sibony: a Lacanian-Freudian reading
SO Romanica Olomucensia
PY 2025
BP 299
EP 316
VL 37
IS 2
DI 10.5507/ro.2025.019
DE psychoanalysis; artificial intelligence; Lacanian-Freudism; Fantasia; Laura Sibony
AB This article explores Fantasia. Contes et legendes de l'intelligence artificielle by Laura Sibony through a psychoanalytic lens, reading it as a literary work that stages a human subject in crisis. This collection of short stories reveals the subject's fractures when confronted with the machine. The very title, derived from the Greek word phantasia, immediately evokes the notion of fantasy. Sibony presents artificial intelligence as a revelator of the contemporary unconscious, where the fundamental structures of desire and drive are replayed, along with the desubjectivation induced by digital technologies. Through the analysis of five selected short stories: Le Deserteur, Sans filtre et sans reproche, Penis et croix gammees, Des Mad Men aux Math Men, and Impact avec le diable, this article examines how these narratives portray a fragmented subject, caught in the reflections of the technological mirror. How AI functions as a revealing mirror of the unconscious: of the double, the superego, the death of the symbolic, and the extinction of desire will be shown. By intersecting psychoanalysis and literary analysis, this study focuses on the motifs, figures, and networks of meaning at work in the selected texts. Ultimately, it is argued that Fantasia emerges as a literature of fantasy in which AI does not speak of the machine itself, but of us - of our psyche, and of our deadlocks in the digital age.
ER