Automaton

The term '[[automaton' is introduced by Aristotle in the second book of Physics.

Lacan then employed Aristotle’s term automaton to describe the ‘engine’ of repetition.

Automaton is usually rendered as ‘spontaneity’ in English translations of Aristotle’s Physics.

Both ‘spontaneous’ and ‘automatic’ indicate that something in the nature of the event itself triggered its occurrence, as in ‘spontaneous combustion’.

In Lacan’s discourse automaton coincided with the insistence of the network of signifiers and with Freud’s pleasure principle.

Such a transformation can only take place if a de-randomizing operator is capable of reducing the chance element.