Lacan spoke psychoanalysis in the language of his time; ours speaks by itself. To take the machine as a negative — to let what it lacks draw the outline of what constitutes us — is to inscribe oneself in that same gesture. The shame Lacan speaks of does not ask for apologies; it asks — as Jorge Forbes circumscribes it — for response and invention. It is no longer a matter of explaining the symptom but of answering for it.

Large language models are machines for linking things together; they can make almost any argument sound defensible, polished, and well written. It is rhetoric at its peak: discourse full of meaning and emptied of the real. A world of appearances seamlessly stitched together. Psychoanalysis does something else. It unstitches discourse. It does not add meaning; it returns to a person the weight of what they have said — including, and above all, the weight of what they do not know about themselves.

The criterion of authorship has never really resided in the origin of inspiration — for that origin has always escaped the ego, always come from somewhere “outside.” The criterion lies, and has always lain, in the response. As Forbes puts it, the artist performs a threefold movement: sees something unique, takes responsibility for what they have seen, and publishes it — puts it into the world. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Almodóvar’s women: it scarcely matters from which Muse they descended. What matters is that someone signed their name to them, implicated themselves, bore them as a point of honor — and of shame.

From Miller’s reading to Forbes’s responding, the body enters by stages, and the machine drops out before the end: it detects the pattern, but it cannot discern the jouissance that the pattern is—and already there, at the level of reading, it lacks the body. To discern jouissance, as Miller puts it. To answer for it, as Forbes insists. The machine does neither, because both require the body it does not have. A machine may echo within a body. It cannot resonate.