ABSTRACT
From a psychoanalytical perspective, one of the fundamental traits of the contemporary age consists in a generalized loosening of our bond with the Other. The current subject appears to be detached from the Other, adrift, deprived of those symbolic and ideal references that are meant to exercise a function of guidance; influenced by an unlimited offer of objects of enjoyment, inhuman partners which are at both hand and mouth reach, always available, and which have replaced the unpredictable contingency that characterizes our encounter with the Other sex. As many have noticed, the symbolic power of the big Other has irreversibly weakened, and our time is a time of monadic enjoyment, as Adorno already observed in Minima Moralia. In other words, it is the time of an autistic radicalization of the individual, which excludes the trans-individual dimension of the subject. Following Lacan, we must distinguish between the individual and the subject. First and foremost, because the subject is structurally split insofar as it implies an intrinsic presence of the Other (that is, of desire and of the alterity that structurally constitute him). As a consequence, the subject cannot be reduced to the individual who, as the etymology of the term tells us, stands for an undivided “being,” an identity that corresponds to itself.
