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Kittler wrote that twentieth-century technologies could not help but give rise to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In Lacan's writing on The Purloined Letter, the action in the drama shifts the roles from one person to another; the action moves, but reiterates the basic elements of the story. The actors, however, change roles as the perspective shifts. As the Minister shifts from the active role of the robber and deceiver to the passive role of the robbed and deceived, the humans in Sans Objet shift subtly through the piece from the active role to the passive. At the opening, the humans reveal the robot, removing the covering which obscured it, limited its scope of action, and thus protected both the machine from the world, and the world from the machine.
As the piece moves forward, the story and roles do not change in the straightforward linear fashion of Poe's story. The transformations take a more circuitous route, with agency moving back and forth, and sometimes not being the main issue at stake. But the manipulations of the machine become more dominant as the piece develops, until at the end, the humans are completely de-humanized; they have lost their faces, move seemingly at random. The robot seems to have removed something from the humans, something of their identity. Their role has been transformed to a more passive one, where the robot leads the action.