From the "nombrification" of the world to the changes in the subject's relationship with language and the other

The symptomatic changes we have encountered in clinical practice in recent decades cannot fail to be of interest to the clinician. These have emerged in parallel with a certain social context, the particularities of which raise questions about their effects on the process of subjectivation. The proliferation of the diagnoses of autism - which is characterised by an avoidance of the relationship with the Other, understood by Lacan as the Other of language - but also of addictive practices in subjects from any clinical structure, or of so-called borderline personality disorder, to give but a few examples, points to this contemporary tendency to avoid the relationship with the Other mediated by language and castration. This specific feature of a tendency to avoid castration is contemporary with a certain Western social context - which is spreading with globalisation - marked by the rise of a quantification of the world, which finds its paroxysm in capitalist logic, and which is massively supported by technical and technological advances. So how does this current "empire of numbers" - to borrow an expression from Olivier Rey (2016, p.7), a French mathematician, novelist, essayist and philosopher - contribute to the avoidance of a relationship between the subject and the Other, a necessary condition for the process of subjectivation? This question sets us on a journey that goes from the genealogy of the quantification of the world to its digitisation and the impact on the symbolic, and more specifically on the changes in languages and their consequences for contemporary subjects.