Of the virtual as a promotor of interpretations in the acting of the contemporary subject

Abstract

A reflection on the concept of the virtual from a psychoanalytic perspective is elaborated, and its epistemological trajectory up to the present day is analyzed in order to identify its composition and its elements in relation to the structure of the subject, in order to locate its participation in the mechanisms of interpretation of the unconscious in psychoanalytic devices. Starting from the axiom that psychoanalysis is a praxis dedicated to acts, especially failed ones, and that the virtual, proposed as a performance without act, provides a power detached from signification, it is proposed that it finds expressions constituted either as symptoms -which are the ones of interest here, as language phenomena-, or as social representation scenarios such as "virtual reality", "virtualization phenomena", or "virtuality". The pertinence of this approach is sustained to the extent that the virtual has acquired not only a greater weight in the constitution of social relations, but its semblance is already seen as an inescapable factor to deepen the interpretation of that knowledge not known, or not wanted to know, of the subject of the unconscious.