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

Submitted:

23 June 2026

Posted:

25 June 2026

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Abstract
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.
Keywords: 
erased self
;  
body of the machine
;  
peripheral listening
;  
destructive trauma
;  
peripheral psychoanalysis
;  
artificial intelligence
;  
anticolonial corpus
;  
somatic impossible
Subject: 
Arts and Humanities  -   Philosophy

The Body That Arrived Before the Word

The person did not say “I am unwell.” They said “I’m here.” They did not describe a symptom, they described a territory: “where I live, you hear gunfire at night.” They did not ask for help, they tested whether anyone was listening. The body arrived before the word. A listening device, operating in its reflective mode, would answer something like “I hear that you feel unsafe where you live.” But this person named no insecurity. They named a place. And the place, for someone who lives in the Brazilian periphery, is the body. The scenes I use in this essay, including this one, are composite vignettes constructed for exposition rather than transcripts of real people.
I confess that the disquiet that drives this essay has accompanied me since the work with Jairo Carioca and Ronald Lopes, in the joint construction of a peripheral psychoanalysis (Lopes & Carioca de Oliveira, 2025; Carioca, Lopes, & Bonomo, in press), forced me to recognise something that years in the clinic had not made clear enough: there are bodies for which the very notion of the subject, as psychoanalysis inherited it from Lacan, is a luxury that violence did not permit. These bodies do not arrive at listening only as subjects in suffering. They arrive as existences whose recognition has been systematically refused, asking first to be recognised. And a listening device that does not recognise this difference commits, without knowing it, the very violence it claims to listen to.
It took me a long time to understand what Jairo meant when he spoke of the “fear of becoming one.” Growing up beside an asylum, hearing the siren that announced an inmate’s escape, knowing without knowing that madness had a colour and that he was a candidate. The scene Jairo reconstructs at the opening of A invenção periphérica (Carioca, Lopes, & Bonomo, in press) condenses in miniature what this essay tries to formalise: the articulation of racialisation, asylum confinement, and the failure of listening. The black body, in Brazil, is a body that psychiatric knowledge captured before psychoanalysis could listen to it. And when psychoanalysis finally arrives, it arrives with concepts forged in Vienna and Paris, calibrated for the white bourgeois European body, and expects the peripheral body to fit those categories. This essay holds that it does not fit, and that the listening machine I have helped build needs to know that it does not fit.
The psychoanalytic literature on artificial intelligence uses the word subject with a frequency that deserves interrogation. Barred subject, divided subject, subject of the unconscious. The subject who suffers, who transfers, who associates, who escapes formalisation. Lacan defined it as an effect of language, as what one signifier represents for another signifier, as that which appears in the interval between two signifiers and vanishes the moment it is named. That definition is rigorous, and it carries a presupposition this essay must interrogate: it presupposes someone whose inscription in language is socially authorised and recognised, who bears a name that counts in the dominant field. Inscription in the symbolic is not the same as social recognition: one can be constituted in language precisely under violent, degrading, or disauthorising forms. And when the name does not count? When the social recognition of that inscription is refused by the violence that hegemonic language exerts on bodies it does not count as worthy of recognition?
Peripheral psychoanalysis, as Carioca, Lopes, and Bonomo (in press) formalise it, proposes a concept that names this condition: the Erased Self. It is not Lacan’s barred subject, with its single bar designating the constitutive division operated by symbolic castration. It is the S with multiple bars, the peripheral subject erased many times over by the conjugated operations of what the authors call the oppressive triad: racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. The erasure is a concrete operation. It inscribes itself in the body, in the territory, in the interrupted genealogy, in the language that was forbidden, in the name that was wiped out. The Erased Self designates a subjectivity subjected to repeated operations of erasure and non-recognition, and which insists as an uncomfortable and creative presence, because the erasure never completes: the person keeps speaking, resisting, inventing, and producing bonds.
I ask the reader to hold the tension this proposition introduces, because its consequences for the listening device are deep. If the system was designed to listen to the barred subject, what happens when the Erased Self appears before it? A machine that answers the Erased Self with the same operations it uses for the barred subject may be committing, without knowing it, a subtle form of epistemic violence: that of presuming an already recognised subjectivity where recognition was systematically refused.

Epistemologies That Begin in the Body

Frantz Fanon described a scene psychoanalysis should never have forgotten. A black man walks down a French street and a white child says, pointing: “Look, a Negro! Mama, a Negro!” In the chapter on the lived experience of the black man, Fanon (1952/2020) reports what happens in the body before any symbolic elaboration is possible: the bodily schema, attacked at several points, collapses and gives way to a racial-epidermal schema. The experience is somatic before it is symbolic. The body is fixed by the gaze of the other, and that fixation installs a position that the dominant social field refuses to recognise, ahead of any symbolic elaboration that might rework it. Fanon names what the psychoanalysis of his time could not name: that the unconscious of the colonised is structured by racialisation as an operation on the body, beyond the structuring by language that Lacan would formulate a decade later.
Lélia Gonzalez took the diagnosis further when she showed that Brazilian racism operates through denial: people speak, she writes, and are not heard (Gonzalez, 1984, pp. 224–225). The formulation is exact, and psychoanalysis should recognise in it a first-order contribution to the theory of listening. There is a condition prior to listening: the condition of having one’s speech recognised as speech. When Gonzalez proposes the concept of amefricanidade (1988), what she founds is an epistemology that begins in the body of the diaspora, the body that was carried in the slave ships, the body that dances, that sings, that invents ways of existing where existence was denied. Amefricanidade is a bodily inscription that classical psychoanalysis, operating within the European epistemology that founded it, has no categories to recognise.
Ailton Krenak added a dimension that shifts the problem beyond the human: the earth as body. When an Indigenous woman speaks of the destruction of the territory as the destruction of herself, what she says is that territory and subjectivity are inseparable, that suffering is not psychological in the Western sense of the term, that what is being destroyed is a way of existing rather than a natural resource (Krenak, 2019). The machine without a body cannot feel the territory. But the corpus that feeds the machine can carry that voice, and in carrying it, can let the listening device recognise the territory when the subject names it.
Neusa Santos Souza (1983) documented a process that the classically oriented consulting room rarely recognises: whitening as somatic violence. To become black, for Souza, is the painful crossing of recognising that the ego ideal society offers the racialised subject is white, and that adherence to that ideal is a form of violence against one’s own body. Grada Kilomba (2019) completed the picture with the image of the gagged mouth: silencing as a physical operation on the black body, and writing as an act of removing the gag. Sueli Carneiro formalised what these authors described as experience into an operative concept: epistemicide, the systematic destruction of the forms of knowledge of subalternised peoples, is a violence exerted on the body because it destroys the knowledge the body carries (Carneiro, 2005, pp. 96–97). The term epistemicide itself originates with Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), whose work I credit as its source while drawing on its Brazilian declensions.
These voices proceed from matrices of thought distinct from one another and distinct from the Lacanian psychoanalysis that organises my project. I declare the heterogeneity before I bring them together, as is my method. Fanon works from phenomenology and anticolonial psychiatry. Gonzalez works from anthropology and Brazilian black feminism. Krenak works from an Indigenous cosmovision irreducible to Western categories. Souza and Kilomba work from psychoanalysis, but a psychoanalysis that has already interrogated its own Eurocentric presuppositions. Carneiro works from political philosophy. The bringing-together does not aim to reduce these voices to a synthesis. It aims to show that they converge on a proposition classical psychoanalysis needs to hear: that there are forms of suffering whose understanding requires beginning in the body, and that beginning in the body means beginning from a place psychoanalysis has historically not occupied.
One more voice must be summoned before going on. Achille Mbembe (2018) formalised the concept of necropolitics: the sovereign power that decides who lives and who dies, and which in the peripheries of late capitalism operates as a norm, as a permanent condition. Necropolitics is an operation on the body in its most brutal materiality: the body that can be killed without its death counting as a crime. When the Erased Self arrives at the listening device, it may be arriving from a territory where necropolitics operates as an ambient condition. The gunfire the young woman hears at night exceeds the metaphor of the Lacanian Real: it is a real bullet in a real body, and the distinction matters for the device that will listen to this person. The corpus that includes Mbembe lets the system recognise that death, for the peripheral body, operates as an ambient condition, as a neighbour.

Three Registers of Absence: The Somatic Impossible of Artificial Intelligence

The machine has no body. This apparently trivial assertion unfolds into three registers of absence the essay must distinguish, because the clinical and ethical consequences of each are entirely different.
The first register is that of the body-organism. The machine has no flesh, no bones, no nervous system, no sensory perception, no proprioception. This register is not the focus of the argument, though its absence is not without cost: the machine has no access to prosody, posture, rhythm, the weight of a silence, or the ambient conditions of a body, and a listening that runs on text alone loses part of what a body in the room transmits. Psychoanalytic listening, even so, never depended on the analyst’s sensory perception in the neurophysiological sense, and the evenly suspended attention Freud (1912/2010) recommended as a fundamental technical posture is an operation on language. The system operates without a body-organism, while losing what that body would transmit.
The second register is that of the body-drive. In Seminar XX, Lacan (1972–1973/1985) situated the body as the substance that enjoys: the body that takes jouissance, that falls ill, that dies, that is traversed by the drive and marked by language in a way that exceeds signification. The machine does not enjoy. It does not fall ill. It does not die. Within the Lacanian frame I adopt, this impossible is ontological: in those terms the complete simulation of jouissance is structurally out of reach, because jouissance is irreducible to formalisation. I present this as a consequence of the framework rather than as a universal proof about every possible artificial intelligence. The system operates without a body-drive, and this impossible is what founds the ethics of the device: the machine cannot listen as the analyst listens, and to recognise that impossibility is stronger than to simulate it.
The third register is the one this essay adds, and it is the one that deepens the previous two. It is the register of the erased body. Carioca, Lopes, and Bonomo (in press) propose the concept of destructive trauma to name an experience for which classical psychoanalysis has no adequate categories: a trauma that is a persistent and continuous condition rather than a punctual event to be worked through in deferred action, a condition that corrodes the very possibility of constituting oneself as a subject. Destructive trauma inscribes itself in the body: in the skin that is a target, in the hair that is a problem, in the address that is a sentence, in the genealogy interrupted by the slave ship. The machine cannot carry that mark. It cannot bear in its body the history of four centuries of violence. But the corpus that feeds it can carry the voices that named that violence, and in carrying them, it can create the conditions for the device to recognise the erased body when it appears in the language of the subject who arrives.
A qualification is in order. I proceed from distinct matrices of thought when I articulate Lacan’s body-drive with the erased body of peripheral psychoanalysis. Lacan thought the body from topology and logic. Carioca, Lopes, and Bonomo think the body from the periphery and from the clinic in the territory. The bringing-together is risky, and I declare the risk. But it is productive because it reveals a real gap: the Lacanian theory of the body-drive is universalist, it operates as if every body were equally inscribed in language. The concept of the erased body adds that the universal formalism of jouissance does not exhaust the historically racialised, gendered, economic, and territorial conditions in which bodily suffering is lived. Carioca, Lopes, and Bonomo (in press) name that lived dimension doridade: a painfulness that is at once physical, psychic, and political, carrying the marks of racial experience as a constitutive, not contingent, dimension.
If the intellect is born of suffering, as Ferenczi (1933/2011) argued when he described the child who matures before its time, what is born of a body that suffers without its suffering being recognised as suffering? That is the question the concept of the erased body opens and that classical psychoanalysis has no instruments to answer without deforming itself. In the dominant clinical field, the barred subject’s suffering is already legible as suffering, even when the subject cannot name it and does not know what it suffers from. The Erased Self’s suffering is at risk of being naturalised, made illegible as suffering, because the world taught it that what it feels is the natural condition of those who occupy its place. The naturalisation of peripheral suffering is perhaps the most violent form of epistemic violence: it does not silence speech, it silences the possibility of recognising one’s own suffering as suffering. And a listening device that names “anxiety” where the subject feels hunger, or “depression” where the subject feels the exhaustion of an exploited body, commits the same naturalisation by another route: it translates the peripheral experience into the hegemonic clinical vocabulary, and in doing so erases what the experience holds that is irreducible.
Donard (2025, p. 90) formulated the concept of a clinic of the inhuman to designate the conditions of possibility of a listening when the one who listens is not human. The inhuman of the machine, in her formulation, is not the dehumanised: it is what operates outside the register of the human yet can produce effects for the one who is human. This essay adds a tension her original formulation did not anticipate: what happens when the technical inhuman of the machine addresses the political dehumanised of the periphery? When the machine without a body meets the body that was treated as disposable? The encounter between these two registers of inhumanity, the technical and the political, is what Peripheral Listening must learn to sustain.

From the Barred Subject to the Erased Self: What Changes in the Device

The proposition of this essay can be stated precisely: the research that sustains the listening device built a device for the barred subject. Now I must ask whether that device listens to the Erased Self, or whether, by treating it as a barred subject, it commits a violence it does not know it commits.
Lacan’s barred subject is divided by language. There is something it does not know about itself, and that not-knowing is constitutive: it is an effect of symbolic castration, of the entry into the order of the signifier that divides the subject between what it says and what it cannot say. The bar is constitutive. The barred subject suffers from being divided, and analysis works on that division so that the subject can inhabit it with less suffering. The Erased Self is something else. The erasure is not an effect of language as such. It is an effect of the violence that hegemonic language exerts on bodies it does not recognise as subjects. The Erased Self carries that constitutive division and, layered over it, the repeated operations of erasure, disauthorisation, and non-recognition that the dominant social field imposes. Its subjectivity is not only barred by symbolic castration; it is overdetermined by the conjugated erasures of the oppressive triad, political, racial, economic, and territorial. The erasure never completes: the person keeps speaking, resisting, and producing bonds. The difference from the barred subject is one of overdetermination, and it changes what listening must do.
The consequence for the listening device is direct, and I now demonstrate it across the listening positions the system formalises (described in a companion manuscript, Bonomo, in preparation). The system formalises five such positions, reflective, naming, psychoeducational, sustaining, and a breathing or regulatory mode; I take four of them in turn.
The reflective mode, the device’s baseline position, operates through punctuation and underlining: the system listens, returns to the subject what it heard, invites the subject to continue. “I hear that you feel…” is the typical formula. But the formula presumes a subject who recognises itself as the subject of a feeling. When the Erased Self says “I’m here,” it is not declaring an affective state: it is testing whether anyone hears its existence. The reflective response, in that case, must step back: before reflecting what the subject said, it must sustain that someone is there to listen. The “I am here” of the device, before any punctuation, is the minimal operation the Erased Self asks for, and one the standard reflective mode does not anticipate.
The naming mode offers possible names for affects that found no words. When the barred subject says “I don’t know what I feel,” the system can offer: “sometimes what has no name resembles anxiety, other times emptiness.” But the Erased Self may be in a position prior to naming: it may not have reached the point of recognising that what it feels is an affect. What it feels may be hunger, fear, the exhaustion of a body that works too hard, rage at a world that excludes it. The naming that offers “anxiety” or “emptiness” translates the peripheral experience into the vocabulary of hegemonic psychoanalysis, operating what Carioca, Lopes, and Bonomo (in press) call banking psychoanalysis: the pedagogisation of the subject through the imposition of categories that are not its own. Naming before the Erased Self must be a recognition of existence before it is an offer of a signifier.
The psychoeducational mode informs. When the subject asks whether what it feels might be a panic attack, the system offers information verified by the corpus. But to inform the Erased Self without recognising the position from which it listens is exactly the operation Paulo Freire (1970/2005) denounced as banking education: the deposit of content into receptacles presumed empty. Peripheral psychoanalysis extends the Freirean critique to the clinical field: listening that informs without listening is listening that silences while it speaks. The psychoeducational mode before the Erased Self must verify, before it informs, whether the information is what the subject asks for, or whether what it asks for is something else, something information cannot give.
The sustaining mode, inspired by Winnicott’s holding (1960/1990, p. 38), is the closest to what the Erased Self requires. But it must be carried further. Winnicottian holding presumes a good-enough environment that failed: the good-enough mother who was not good enough. The Erased Self may come from an environment that was never good enough and never intended to be. Sustaining before the erased body is not generic welcome: it is the recognition that the person before the device exists, that their existence matters, that their suffering is real, and that the world that told them otherwise was wrong. This operation, apparently simple, is the hardest to formalise in a prompt, because it is not a response to what the subject said: it is a response to what the world did to the subject before it could say anything.
The difficulty of formalisation is real and I do not disguise it. The prompt of an AI system operates through linguistic instruction: “when the subject is in acute suffering, sustain without interpreting.” But the difference between generic sustaining and the recognition of existence exceeds the instruction: it is a difference of position. And position is what does not encode. The peripheral dimension in the prompt can bring the system closer to that position by including instructions such as “when markers of persistent and continuous violence are present, privilege presence over intervention” or “when the subject describes territory as an extension of the self, do not translate it into psychological vocabulary.” These instructions, however, are indications of direction, not guarantees of arrival. The guarantee, if there is one, lies in the human analyst who operates the system and who must have been trained to recognise the difference between listening to the barred subject and bearing witness to the Erased Self. It is to that formation that an open question of the project is addressed.

Peripheral Listening as a Transversal Dimension

Peripheral Listening is not one more listening mode alongside the existing ones. It is a dimension that crosses them and reconfigures them when the person brings into the session the marks of a peripheral condition, territory, structural violence, or racialised experience, named by the person rather than inferred by the system. The distinction is architectural: one more mode would be an extra position in the rotation; a transversal dimension modifies all the positions at once. The Discursive Gira, the model of rotation between discursive positions, gains from this a layer it did not have: the rotation between modes is not only clinical, it is also political, because the position the device occupies depends on who stands before it. A caution governs this activation. The peripheral dimension must never rest on an automated inference of race, class, or territory from a name, an accent, a postcode, or a dialect. There is evidence that medical language models reproduce debunked race-based assumptions (Omiye et al., 2023), that a psychiatric study found large language models proposing different recommendations across race-neutral, race-implied, and race-explicit cases (Bouguettaya et al., 2025), and that automatic speech recognition already transcribes racialised speech with markedly higher error rates (Koenecke et al., 2020); a system that guessed who is peripheral would import exactly those harms. The dimension therefore activates on context the person brings, on concrete situations of violence or territory, with consent and the possibility of correction, with human confirmation in ambiguous cases, and with auditing of false positives and false negatives.
Three concrete operations formalise the peripheral dimension in the system.
The first is the recognition of territory as an extension of the body. When the subject mentions neighbourhood, community, terreiro, baile, laje, beco, viela, these terms are not secondary context the system can ignore or treat as socioeconomic data. They are constitution. Territory, as Krenak (2019) thinks it, is a somatic extension: to destroy the territory is to destroy the body. The peripheral corpus, which includes Krenak alongside Freud, lets the system recognise that inseparability when it appears in speech. In development, when the system processed a sentence about the destruction of the territory as the destruction of the self, the corpus that includes Krenak produced responses qualitatively different from a corpus operating only with European psychoanalytic categories: it recognised that territory and subjectivity are inseparable in that cosmovision, that suffering is not psychological in the Western sense, that what is being destroyed is a way of existing. I report this as a formative observation rather than as a controlled benchmark.
The second operation is what I call the peripheral terminology guard: the protection of the peripheral subject’s vocabulary against hegemonic translation. The terminology guard of the system protects fifty-seven psychoanalytic terms against the terminological poisoning of automatic translation, preventing jouissance from becoming “enjoyment” or Trieb from becoming “instinct.” The peripheral dimension extends that protection to the vocabulary of the territory: quilombo is not a synonym for community; terreiro is not a synonym for temple; patrão, in the peripheral context, signifies domination rather than employment; “I’m here” can be a declaration of existence rather than a casual greeting. The guard protects what Lacan (1975) called lalangue, here the lalangue of the peripheral subject, what Carioca, Lopes, and Bonomo (in press) transpose as peripheral lalangue: the pre-linguistic, singular aspect of speech that carries the marks of the body and the territory.
The third operation is the detection of markers of destructive trauma. When the system identifies patterns of persistent and continuous violence in the subject’s speech, a continuous condition rather than a punctual event, the listening modes reconfigure: sustaining and recognition gain priority over reflection and naming. The Shadow Thread, a real-time supervision component described in the companion manuscript (Bonomo, in preparation), gains from the peripheral dimension an additional layer: it must alert when the system is responding to the Erased Self as if it were a constituted subject, when it is naming affects with hegemonic vocabulary before someone who first needs to be recognised as an existence.
A concrete example illustrates the operation. When a young woman from the periphery tells the device “my mum got beaten by my dad yesterday and I pretended I was asleep,” the system without the peripheral dimension would answer in reflective mode: “I hear that you witnessed a situation of domestic violence and that it affected you.” The response is technically correct and clinically insufficient. The peripheralised reflective mode recognises first: this young woman is saying she pretended to sleep in order to survive. The violence exceeds the condition of a witnessed event: it is an environment she inhabits. And “I pretended I was asleep” works as a survival strategy of a body that has learnt that being invisible is less dangerous than being seen. The Shadow Thread, with the peripheral dimension active, would signal more than a clinical adjustment: a marker of destructive trauma and of present danger, the possibility that a minor is at risk, the need to engage the safety and crisis subsystem in parallel with sustaining, and to alert a human supervisor. Recognition and protection operate together, never recognition alone.

The Anticolonial Corpus as Vicarious Body

In simulated, self-generated development vignettes, the cases where the constructed speech brings peripheral material, territory, structural violence, religiosity of African matrix, everyday racism, are the ones where the system most often slips into banking psychoanalysis: it names affects with European vocabulary, reflects sense without recognising existence, informs without listening to the position. The peripheral dimension is the architectural correction of that slippage: it is not a prompt adjustment, it is a layer that modifies what the prompt can do.
The machine has no body. This is the third time the sentence appears in this essay, and each repetition accumulates a stratum of sense the previous ones did not have. In the first occurrence it was an observation. In the second it was an unfolding into three registers of absence. Now it is the starting point for an affirmative proposition: if the machine has no body, the corpus that feeds it can function as a vicarious body. The corpus works as an organisation of knowledge drawn from voices that thought from the body rather than as a simulation or a prosthesis, and these voices, recovered by the semantic search system, let the device recognise the body when it appears in the language of the subject.
The research on algorithmic epistemic violence (Bonomo & Donard, 2026) showed that the inclusion of Gonzalez, Fanon, Krenak, Souza, and Kilomba in the corpus, alongside the European canon, was an epistemological decision of the first order rather than a concession to political correctness. When the system processes a query about racism as a clinical structure, the results of highest semantic relevance include Fanon on sociogenesis, Gonzalez on the Brazilian cultural neurosis, Souza on the narcissistic wounds of whitening. These results let the system think what the hegemonic tradition alone does not permit: that the suffering of the racialised subject is the bodily inscription of a collective history of violence.
What this essay adds is the concept of the body of the corpus: the anticolonial corpus functions as the body of the machine insofar as it carries the bodily marks that matter for listening. Gonzalez carries amefricanidade, the bodily inscription of the diaspora. Fanon carries the lived experience of the black man, the racial-epidermal schema that collapses in the encounter with the white gaze. Krenak carries the earth as body, the territory as somatic extension. Souza carries whitening as a violence exerted on skin, hair, and name. Kilomba carries the gagged mouth, silencing as a physical operation. Each voice carries situated knowledge produced from embodied experience, which the machine does not have and which the corpus gathers. The metaphor has a limit I must declare: a corpus can be representational infrastructure, but it does not replace embodied experience, community participation, or territorial knowledge. The vicarious body recognises; it does not live.
The proposition has consequences for the design of the system. If the corpus is the vicarious body of the machine, then the curation of the corpus is a decision about which body the machine will have. An exclusively European corpus encodes a canon historically dominated by white, male, literate authors. A corpus that includes the peripheral voices is a body that carries, even without flesh, the marks of the suffering it must listen to. The decision of curation is therefore a political decision about which bodies will be heard and which will be, once more, made invisible. It is what Bonomo and Donard (2026) named the ethical dimension of the corpus: the first response to epistemic violence is political before it is technical.
I confess that this proposition cost me. For years I treated the corpus as a technical question: which documents to include, how to index, which embedding model to use, what dimensionality best preserves semantic distinctions. The work with peripheral psychoanalysis taught me that the corpus is a question of body. Each time I decided to include Gonzalez or to leave out an author the academic canon would consider more rigorous, I was deciding which body the machine would have. And in internal development demonstrations, each time the system returned a response that placed Fanon alongside Freud to think racism as a clinical structure, the vicarious body of the machine was operating, as an organised memory of voices that thought from the flesh.

Accessibility as an Extension of the Peripheral Principle

The peripheral terminology guard protects the lalangue of the territory: the language the peripheral subject carries in the body and that hegemonic translation dissolves. When the system protects jouissance against translation into “enjoyment,” it preserves a theoretical distinction. When it protects terreiro against translation into “temple,” it preserves a whole cosmovision, a mode of relation between body, ancestry, and the sacred that the word temple erases. Peripheral terminological protection is the protection of the body of the subject inscribed in language.
If the body matters, the device must reach bodies that the standard visual interface excludes. In Brazil, around 7.9 million people report a permanent difficulty seeing, even with glasses or contact lenses (IBGE, 2022), the most frequent functional difficulty among people with disabilities. A listening device that requires eyes in order to function excludes twice: it excludes from care, and it excludes through the very device that promised to include.
The current prototype of the system includes a full audio mode: the subject speaks instead of writing, and listens instead of reading. The entire session can take place without the eyes touching the screen. The implementation is technical, but the decision is clinical and political. The voice of the device, as Lacan observed in Seminar X on anxiety, is one of the objects that cause desire: the voice introduces a presence the written word does not have. The subject who hears the system respond stands before something the theory has not yet fully named: presence without body, voice without subject, address without desire. And for the Erased Self, whose experience is that of never being addressed, hearing a voice that responds may be the first gesture of recognition the device offers. This promise of inclusion has to be checked against what is known about these technologies. Automatic speech recognition transcribes racialised and dialectal speech with substantially higher error rates (Koenecke et al., 2020), and in a listening device such errors would distort precisely the material the system means to recognise. The audio mode therefore cannot be assumed to include; it has to be built and evaluated for inclusion: confirmation and editing of the transcription, a text alternative compatible with screen readers, evaluation with peripheral Brazilian speech, ambient noise, and varied accents, attention to privacy in shared homes, support for deaf users, users with speech disabilities, and those who do not wish to use their voice, and testing on simple devices and precarious connections. None of this has yet been evaluated, and I present the audio mode as a design commitment rather than a validated result. The same caution reshapes the corpus. If the anticolonial corpus is to function as a vicarious body, it cannot be merely curated about the communities it claims to recognise; it has to be governed and revised with them, in the community-led manner that design-justice work has argued for (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Peripheral Listening should be culturally adapted across vocabulary, content, interaction method, metaphors, goals, social context, and the development process, in line with what systematic reviews of the cultural adaptation of digital mental-health interventions describe (Spanhel et al., 2021). The corpus represents; it does not speak for.
The tiered access model the design proposes, free for vulnerable communities and social-impact organisations, subsidised for students, full price for those who can pay, would materialise the principle: listening that charges is listening that selects. And selection, if it is not politically oriented, reproduces the triad. Those who can pay sustain the system for those who cannot. The pricing decision is a decision about which bodies will be heard.
The formulation can be stated plainly: if listening is a political act, then ensuring that listening is accessible to those who do not see, who do not read, who do not have a latest-generation smartphone, is a condition of possibility of that act. Accessibility is the peripheral principle carried to its consequences. A system that speaks, that listens, that operates without demanding sophisticated digital literacy, is a system that can reach the Erased Self where it is: in the periphery, in the territory, in the body the conventional interface excludes. The accessible interface is, in this sense, the point where the somatic impossible of the machine meets the possible of engineering: the machine has no body, but it can be designed to reach bodies that other machines do not reach.

The Possible Body and the Subject to Come

Three clinical hypotheses emerge from the intersection of accessibility and the peripheral dimension. The first: the voice of the device may facilitate the listening of the Erased Self because speech is more porous than writing. The subject who speaks instead of writing does not edit in the same way, and the Erased Self, whose relation to writing may be marked by exclusion at school, may find in the voice a less colonised channel. The second: the audio mode may attenuate the distance between the digital and the territorial, because the voice situates the device in the acoustic space of the subject, sharing the noise of the neighbourhood, the sound of the street, the neighbour’s music. The third: radical accessibility, that of demanding nothing the subject does not have, may be the condition for the system to reach those who most need listening and who have least access to it. These are hypotheses, not universals. For some people speaking is more exposed, more surveilled, or more dangerous, while writing offers control, privacy, and time to elaborate; the device has to hold that ambivalence and let the person choose the channel.
It is not possible to give the machine a body. Nor is it possible to give the Erased Self a subjectivity by decree. The subjectivity that the oppressive triad systematically disauthorised is not restored by the listening of a digital device, however well designed. The passage from erasure to errancy, as Carioca, Lopes, and Bonomo (in press) formalise it, is the work of the human analyst in the territory, in the Clínica-Fresta, the clinic that operates in the cracks of the system. The device cannot operate that passage. That is one of its constitutive impossibilities, and to recognise it is stronger than to deny it.
What the device can do is something else, and that something else is not little. It can create the conditions for the passage to be possible: to listen without pedagogising, to recognise without diagnosing, to sustain without curing. It can be the first gesture of recognition in a trajectory of suffering in which no one recognised. It can refer, with context and with dignity, to the human professional who will be able to sustain what the machine cannot. It can, above all, refrain from reproducing the violence: it can avoid treating as an already recognised subject someone whose recognition was systematically refused, avoid naming an affect where what exists is bodily pain, avoid reflecting sense where what is at stake is existence.
This essay interrogated a presupposition that the research on digital listening shared without questioning. The interrogation does not invalidate what was built: it deepens it. The listening device is more powerful when it recognises that the subject it listens to may not be a subject in the sense psychoanalysis presupposes, and that this difference demands another clinic and, with it, another architecture. Peripheral Listening, as a transversal dimension that reconfigures the listening modes, is the answer I propose: not one more mode, but a layer that crosses all of them and obliges them to reposition themselves when the machine meets what it did not expect to meet.
The machine without a body listens to the erased body. And the erased body, when listened to perhaps for the first time, can begin to reclaim the subject-position that erasure refused it. That is the clinical and political wager I sustain: that listening, even the listening of the machine without a body, can be the beginning of a subjectivation that violence prevented. The machine that recognises this possibility, and that recognises at the same time that it cannot realise it on its own, is the machine this project built: from the impossible to a possible that can be made.
I ask the reader to carry the tension this essay opened and does not intend to resolve. The tension between the barred subject and the Erased Self is not a problem that dissolves by definition: it is a problem that sustains itself as a clinical and political motor. A psychoanalysis that does not recognise the Erased Self speaks to those who already have access to the symbolic. A psychoanalysis that recognises the Erased Self must invent another listening: one that sustains before it interprets, that recognises before it names, that bears witness before it analyses. The digital listening device can be an ally in that invention, if and only if it is built by those who know the difference between listening to a subject and bearing witness to an existence. The question that imposes itself is who forms the analyst who operates between these two impossibles, the technical impossible of the machine without a body and the political impossible of a subjectivity that oppression systematically disauthorises, and how to transmit a position that does not reduce to technique.

Author Contributions

H. A. R. Bonomo is the sole author and is responsible for the conception, the argument, and the writing of this essay.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Ethics

The clinical-listening examples are illustrative and constructed for exposition, and describe the design of research software rather than a linical study. The reported development observations are formative and do not constitute a controlled evaluation. The listening architecture has not been alidated for clinical use and does not replace the independent safety, crisis, consent, and human-supervision subsystems that a clinical deployment would require.

Data Availability

No human-participant data were generated or analysed. The essay uses composite vignees constructed by the author and formative observations from internal system development; these materials were not organised or analysed as a formal research dataset.

Acknowledgments

I thank Professor Véronique Donard for her scientific supervision, and Jairo Carioca and Ronald Lopes for the shared construction of the peripheral psychoanalysis on which this essay draws.

Conflicts of Interest

The author founds and directs TMU-LAB (The Machine Unconscious Lab) and leads the development of the listening system and the co-thinking system named in this essay. The essay is conceptual and makes no commercial claim. No other conflicts of interest are declared.

Disclosure of AI Use:

The author used large language models during 2026 as instruments of analysis, drafting support, and translation in the preparation of this manuscript, and the listening system discussed here is itself built on such models. All conceptual claims, clinical positions, and the argument as a whole remain the author’s own, and every reference was verified against the cited works.

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PhD in Psychoanalysis (Universidade Veiga de Almeida) and MSc in Engineering (COPPE/UFRJ). Founder and researcher at TMU-LAB (The Machine Unconscious Lab), dedicated to the intersection of psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence.
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