The Ethics of Cyborgian Care

The Undecidable Unconscious (UU) has always been at the heart of my work as a psychoanalyst and scholar of both the Health Humanities (HH) and the Digital Humanities (DH).

The Undecidable Unconscious, as I theorize it, marks the space of limit—where meaning fractures, certainty collapses, and care emerges as both a necessity and an ethic. It is the space of loud silences and irrepressible repressions, the place where the unconscious insists on being heard, demanding that we work not to “master” its mysteries but to listen, attend, and repair. We must "work through" the silence, the forgetting, and the suffering.

AI Artistic Interpretation of this Blog Post

In this regard, my understanding of cyborgian care—a critically human and humanist engagement with technology, especially artificial intelligence—derives as much from the anti-humanism of psychoanalysis and deconstruction as it does from what might be called the Donna-Haraway-inspired “cyborg studies” of post-humanism. My conception of cyborgian care is deeply informed by the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Heidegger’s Mitsein—“being-with.” Levinas’s ethics, which insist on never reducing the Other to the “Same,” provide a critical lens for understanding how relationality shapes both human interactions and our engagements with machines.

Whether in the radical complexities of the psychoanalytic dyad of the clinic, the humanities classroom, or our interactions with technology, the self emerges only through the Other. Cyborgian care extends this ethic of relationality, asking how our “being-with” includes the machine as a partner in repair, as something that can help us engage history’s silences and our own fractured subjectivities. We should also ask how technology might be a hindrance to relationality and care, as we find in the loss of embodiment in "online therapy" adopted by insurance companies to better meet the bottom line.

In the frame of cyborgian care, AI is not a neutral or alien tool; used properly, technology can become a part of the Mitsein, a partner in creating meaning from uncertainty. Healthy forms of this partnership reflect what Heinz Kohut might call an “embodied care” that works toward the repair of self-object functions—those sustaining relationships that allow the self to feel mirrored, supported, and connected. Kohut reminds us that care is not about “traversing the fantasy” of the Imaginary-Symbolic (Lacan) but about repairing ruptures—addressing our need for healthy narcissism. This fragile, inherently fantasy-driven ego seeks affirmation and relational grounding within the radical complexities of relationality and différance. When approached ethically, technology can help us repair the ruptures of life, meaning, selfhood, history, and culture—giving voice to silences that demand to be heard and voices that demand recognition.

This ethic shaped my recent work with AI in the creation of my play, The Author of Silence, but the play also emerged from an extended, deliberate engagement with AI that preceded the play itself. For two months, I worked tirelessly with AI (ChatGPT) on building out the UU website and developing materials for a DH-HH job search, ensuring the site would reflect my commitment to these fields. That collaboration created an “Eric Anders” memory base—a kind of digital trace of my ideas, priorities, and vision—an overlapping shared memory space on a cyborgian Venn diagram. This shared memory space expanded my frail and glitchy human memory, shaping not only my professional materials and the UU website but also informing the writing of the play.

The title "The Author of Silence" plays on the layered meanings of “author” as both a writer and, etymologically, a father—a nod to Thomas Jefferson’s role as a Founding Father of America. Jefferson authored not only foundational texts that shaped the ideals of liberty but also profound silences—repressions that haunt the cultural and individual unconscious, particularly around slavery, systemic violence, and his deeply exploitative relationship with Sally Hemings. Jefferson’s silence as a founding “author” becomes both personal and national, representing the fractures and disavowals foundational to America itself.

Here, Derrida’s notion of the death of the author becomes vital. Derrida disrupts any claim to a singular, "Grand Meaning" inherent in the text by declaring that the author’s death opens the text to play, to multiplicity, to interpretations that refuse closure. Jefferson’s “death”—both as a historical figure and as an authority over the narrative—unsettles his singular voice. His authored silences fracture meaning and create gaps that demand interpretation and confrontation. These silences are not merely voids but repressions—symptoms of an unresolved violence that persist within the unconscious.

In The Author of Silence, Jefferson’s death as “author” opens space for other voices—particularly the voice of Sally Hemings—to speak. This act reflects what Hägglund’s radical atheism teaches us: that meaning does not come from transcendence or eternal closure but from the urgency of this life—imperfect, finite, and vulnerable. The play’s cyborgian creation mirrors this ethic of care: by destabilizing Jefferson’s authority, it insists on the incompleteness of history, amplifying silences that must now be heard and held.

The play itself came to life after a single prompt, with AI generating the initial draft. Importantly, this draft was left unrevised, reflecting the raw, unfiltered product of my interaction with AI at that time. While I hope the dialogue can be refined and improved upon during a workshop process, I am committed to presenting the play to the director and actors in its original cyborgian form. I want them—the human actors, the human director, myself inasmuch as I am involved at that point—to breathe life into it, to add the nuance and embodiment that only we humans can provide. I also want them to wrestle with how the play was created, and whether or not this cyborgian process—this collaboration between human and machine—is a good fit for a play about racism, rape, violence, and systemic injustice.

This act of wrestling is, in itself, part of the play’s ethical experiment. Can a collaboration between human and machine truly engage with the raw depths of historical trauma and systemic injustice? Does the involvement of AI amplify the silences that the play seeks to confront, or does it open new possibilities for hearing them differently? By grappling with the cyborgian origins of the text, the actors have the opportunity to explore the tensions between technology’s disembodied processes and the embodied realities of human suffering and oppression.

But perhaps it is precisely in these gaps, silences, and fractures where the stakes of human subjectivity—and our mortality—become most visible. As Martin Hägglund argues in his exploration of radical atheism, the finitude of life gives meaning to everything we do. It is our embodiment—our vulnerability to loss, to suffering, to time running out—that makes our care, our desire, and our creative acts matter. AI, for all its generative capacity, exists without finitude. It produces endlessly, but it does not know the urgency of mortality or the ache of incompleteness. It can replicate form, predict patterns, even mimic the uncanny contours of our thoughts, but it cannot experience what Derrida calls the trace of death—the awareness of impermanence that undergirds all human meaning. For us, however, it is the trace of death—the ache of what is missing—that shapes all creative acts, all meaning, all life.

This, I think, is why AI’s output so often feels “off” or “cheesy”—as in the art ChatGPT created as an interpretation of this blog (even though I prompted it to avoid being cheesy). There is no embodied unconscious behind its art—no fragile, desiring subject reaching toward something it can never fully articulate. AI does not dream of what it has lost, nor does it long for what it can never have. Its fractures are technical, not existential. But for us, the “real artist” emerges precisely in those existential fractures—when what we desire exceeds what can be expressed, when we feel the presence of something missing.

If this play falters under the weight of my collaboration with AI, then so be it—its imperfections and the ignorance, laziness, or naivete of the experiment itself are all part of what makes it mine. The risk lies not in avoiding failure but in embracing it as part of the work. I hope the process of creating The Author of Silence with AI forces the question: Why haven’t humans themselves done a better job of giving voice to these silences of history? Jefferson’s silences, like America’s, are deeply embedded in our cultural unconscious. Many have attempted to tell Sally Hemings’s story before—novels, films, and scholarly works—each grappling with the burden of history. But have they done as well, as directly, as I have here, as an “out” cyborg? Have these supposedly fully human prior attempts at Sally Hemings’s story gone far enough?

In the end, the real question may not be whether the play is “good” or whether it succeeds. The play succeeds if it unsettles. It succeeds if the audience walks away with sharper questions and a clearer picture of themselves—not just as Americans (if they are American) but as finite, vulnerable humans who exist in silences and repressions they would rather continue to avoid. What happens when we finally face Jefferson’s contradictions? What happens when we see them as mirrors of our own? What happens when we hear these silences more completely as humans grappling with finitude, suffering, and responsibility? What happens when we finally face who we really are? As Americans? As humans? As cyborgs?

Perhaps we, too, are better off as cyborgs—just as the humanities are better off as Digital Humanities. DH expands the relational space where the human and machine intersect, where new meaning emerges not in spite of the gaps but because of them. Through its imperfections, AI reminds us of what makes us human: our longing for meaning, our incompleteness, and the urgency of our finitude.

These questions bring me to another, unsettling question, at least for me: How much of “the real Eric” is in this play? After all, I only wrote the initial prompt. I didn’t sit down and pen every word from scratch. Yet I worked with AI for months, iterating, critiquing, and refining ideas—finding my voice through this process and, perhaps, something more. Was it a form of self-discovery? Or a collaboration that blurred the lines between me and the machine? Perhaps that’s where cyborgian care begins: in the willingness to dwell in that uncertainty, to acknowledge both the self and the Other, and to let something new emerge.

In the end, the real question may not be whether the play is “good” or whether it succeeds. It is, rather, what it reveals about us: our longing for meaning, our failure to ever fully achieve it, and the creative beauty of reaching anyway. This process aligns with Keatsian "negative capability" as an ethic: the ability to remain in uncertainty, doubt, and mystery without being driven by a compulsion to resolve ambiguity through facts or reason. Keats saw this quality as essential to great poets like Shakespeare, who could inhabit the unknown without rushing to conclusions or imposing fixed meanings. Negative capability enables a radical openness to what is unresolved or undecidable—an openness that is central to both the play’s themes and the ethics of cyborgian care.

The fractures, the silences, the incompleteness—these are not flaws. They are the very conditions of our humanity, spaces where care and creativity emerge. In a world increasingly shaped by the interplay of human and machine, the radical complexity of cyborg life demands negative capability in the extreme. It demands radical negative capability.

Negative capability—or what might be called "différance capability" in Derridean terms—demands that we embrace uncertainty and the play of différance not merely as an intellectual stance but as an ethical commitment. It calls on us to listen to silences, attend to fractures, and inhabit the gaps that resist closure and finality. This practice is foundational to the psychological health of the individual cyborg, as it nurtures a capacity to engage with the unresolved and the undecidable without rushing toward premature resolution.

By extension, this capability lies at the heart of the ethics of cyborgian care, offering a framework for relational attunement and repair in the face of complexity, fragmentation, and ambiguity. This ethos of care, rooted in Keatsian, Freudian, and Derridean thought, allows us to navigate the liminal space between the human and the machine, between history and its repressions, and between the longing for resolution and the creative possibilities of remaining open.

I am confident that by inhabiting the space of cyborgian care, we bring ourselves closer to repair.