From Electronic Pets in Cyberspace to the “One-all-alone” in the Posthuman Era: A Psychoanalytical Interpretation of Spike Jonze's Her

Spike Jonze's film Her is the story of a man falling in love with an artificial intelligence voice system. The opposition between human and artificial intelligence is a problem that must be faced in the posthuman era. Studying this film with the subject theory of Lacanian-Žižek psychoanalysis upgrades the interpretive terminology and accomplishes the cohesion and transition from Slavoj Žižek's Cyberspace Criticism to Jacques-Alain Miller's "one-all-alone." In the posthuman era, with the combination of capitalist and scientific discourses, the new objet petit a appears with a new form as i-object, which satisfies the subject's desires with better timeliness and more privacy. In the film, the hero Theodore, as the subject, becomes "one-all-alone" due to the fear of sameness-the first posthuman symptom-as well as the fear of difference-the second symptom-which he experiences as "the jouissance in delocalization." Theodore, as the masculine subject, faces an emergence of feminine jouissance and two kinds of NSR (non-sexual rapport):one between sexes and the other of the i-object. In their relationship, Theodore is in a passively lacking state, while Samantha, the artificial intelligence, is in an active state and wants to get more. Comparing Samantha with Ash, an electronic pet from the British TV series Black Mirror, we find that electronic pets are lacking for their subjects, while i-objects make their masculine structured subjects excessively satisfied with feminine jouissance. Finally, the Hegelian logic of "the negation of the negation" can help us solve the problem of the two paradoxical posthuman symptoms. Although these symptoms seem to split us into unhealed parts or even fragments that are difficult to piece together, they urge us to constantly adjust ourselves and find a balance between sameness and difference.