That obscure object of ontology: Lacan, La femme, lathouse and Her

This chapter examines the “object-disoriented ontology” of Jacques Lacan and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in relation to Spike Jonze’s film, Her (2013), and the recent objectal turn in contemporary philosophy. It argues that the smartphone AI of Jonze’s technofable presents what Lacan calls the “lathouse” (object-cause of desire governed by science) according to a Lacanian “masculine” logic that relies on reference to the beyond, which is equally found in Quentin Meillassoux’s “speculative materialism”. This is critiqued through the dialectical materialism of the Slovene School, which instead situates both subject and object as immanent to a “feminine” logic of contradiction.

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