The Body of the Machine: The Erased Self, Peripheral Listening, and the Somatic Impossible of Artificial Intelligence

This essay interrogates a presupposition that the psychoanalytic literature on artificial intelligence shares without questioning: the notion of the subject. Classical psychoanalysis works with the barred subject, divided by language, an effect of symbolic castration. The concept of the Erased Self, as formalised by peripheral psychoanalysis, designates a prior and deeper condition: a subjectivity subjected to repeated operations of erasure, disauthorisation, and non-recognition by the conjugated workings of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, whose constitutive division is overdetermined by erasures that precede and exceed inscription in language. The essay proposes that a digital listening device designed for the barred subject can commit epistemic violence against the Erased Self by presuming an already recognised subjectivity that oppression systematically disauthorised. It argues that the absence of body in the machine deepens when the body that arrives at listening is a peripheral body: racialised, gendered, territorialised, subjected to a destructive trauma that is a continuous, structural condition rather than an event one can work through in deferred action. It proposes Peripheral Listening as a transversal dimension that reconfigures the listening modes of the system when the person brings an erased condition into the session, and it formalises the anticolonial corpus as the vicarious body of the machine: an organisation of knowledge drawn from epistemologies that begin in the body rather than a simulation of somatic presence.