Abstract

This article examines Plotinus’ conception of metaxý – the human as interval between animals and gods – and its resonances in the work of Jacques Lacan, who implicitly retains and reconfigures the notion of the human being as a mediator. Lacan replicates this ancient narrative (humanity as caught in between divinity and animality), but does so within the context of a cyberneticism that replaces gods and angels with symbolic computation. Humanity, according to such a conception, is tacitly regarded not only as a mediator, but as that which is mediated, the subject caught within a significative network modelled on the basis of then-new systems of digital computation.