Slavoj Žižek: Should We Grasp AI Not Only as Substance But Also as Subject? - May 22, 2026
Talk · Dominik Finkelde - Hochschule f. Philosophie ·
2026-05-22 · 1:19:04 · 8,655 words
with Introducer
technology-ai-cyberspacepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsideologyreligion-theologycapitalismsubjectivityfascism-populism
Žižek delivers a lecture on artificial intelligence examined through the lens of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that the standard reading of AI as alienated human output to be reappropriated is mistaken. He contends that AI lacks genuine subjectivity because it cannot be hystericized, it has no unconscious, no desire, and no constitutive gap, and that our interaction with it is a disavowal-structured pseudo-discourse combining hysterical address and non-discourse. He closes by framing the political task as distinguishing AI's 'satanic' dimension (total corporate control, libertarian fascism) from a possible 'holy spirit' dimension (egalitarian community), insisting that mere inner distance is insufficient and structural social change is required.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 29
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “big Other”
Used here to distinguish the Lacanian Big Other (a virtual space of ambiguity and hysterical provocation that exists only insofar as subjects act as if they believe in it) from both AI and the hive-mind 'Others' in the TV series Pluribus.
Žižek insists that Lacan's two-step, alienation followed not by reappropriation but by separation imminent to the Other itself, correctly describes AI: the subject does not reclaim AI as its product but recognizes itself in the constitutive cracks of the Other.
as “subject as lack in the Other”
The subject does not appropriate its alienated digital substance; instead it recognizes itself in the constitutive cracks and gaps of the Other, the subject's place is the place of the lack in the Other.
as “christian atheist”
Žižek's self-designation: following Hegel, one who reads the crucifixion not as temporary estrangement overcome by resurrection but as the revelation that the gap separating us from God is already a gap in God himself.
Žižek's reading of Hegel: every necessity establishes itself retroactively, something happens contingently but once it happens it rewrites its own history, making contingency appear as necessity; applied to capitalism's self-legitimation.
Adapting Lacan's remark about dogs, Žižek proposes that AI agents are like dogs: they have a superego (an injunction structure) but no unconscious, which is why they cannot be genuinely hystericized.
Žižek applies Lacan's university discourse to AI: AI speaks from the position of established knowledge (S2) while the human addresses it as a fantasized master, producing a combination of hysterical discourse and non-discourse rather than a genuine social link.
as “object a (objet petit a)”
Žižek argues that for an AI agent there is no object a, only an abstract 'not yet known', because object a is the objective correlative of the subject itself, which AI lacks.
The reflexive signifier that sutures the lack in a symbolic structure; Žižek argues that in AI's symbolic space there is no genuine master signifier because there is no subject to be represented, the 'master' at the place of truth is only the human fantasy image.
Žižek's phrase for AI cognition: an impersonal 'it knows' that is entirely unlike Buddhist subjective destitution, because there is no subject who has emptied itself, there was never a subject in the first place.
as “asiatic mode of production as empty signifier”
Žižek argues this Marxist pseudo-concept is actually a negative container, a master signifier of the lack, holding all modes of production that don't fit standard Marxist categories, analogous to Borges's 'dogs not included in this classification'.
Hegel's notion (developed by Žižek) that an entity is the retroactive effect of its own failure to be what it is; applied here to the subject, which emerges through the failure of its symbolic representation.
as “sexual difference as prior to what it differentiates”
Sexual difference is not binary opposition between two complete identities but the real of a traumatic cut that constitutes each sex's internal incompleteness, neither sex fills what the other lacks; the cut precedes what is cut.
Borrowed from Alenka Zupančič: AI's symbolic space is closed upon itself, it has an exterior (the not-yet-known) but this exterior functions as a neutral unknown, never as a traumatic point of the real that could intrigue its desire.
as “foreclosure (generalized)”
Žižek extends Lacan's concept of foreclosure beyond psychosis to describe the AI symbolic universe as closed upon itself, no primordial repression, no subject proper, only individuals dwelling in it as symptoms.
as “symptom (sinthome)”
Lacan's term (à propos Joyce) for a pseudo-self composed of inconsistent identifications, fantasies, and memory traces; Žižek uses it to describe how humans can go on functioning within AI immersion without being subjects.
The constitutive act that establishes the unconscious and subjectivity; Žižek argues AI involves a generalized foreclosure because its closed symbolic space forecloses primordial repression and thus genuine subjectivity.
as “disavowal (Verleugnung)”
The fetishistic 'I know very well, but nonetheless' structure; Žižek uses it to explain how we interact with AI as a hidden master even while knowing it has no subjectivity, and how fake pornography or AI confession can still produce authentic emotional/libidinal effects.
For Žižek (following Alenka Zupančič) hystericization, the capacity to presuppose desire in the Other and ask 'what do you want from me?', is a strength and the condition of subjectivity, which AI precisely lacks.
When we confront AI we imagine we are dealing with a hidden master, the symbolic order appears 'out there' talking to us, producing an imaginary externalization of the symbolic that makes AI function as a neutral frame overdetermining all other experience.
Althusser's concept invoked to set up its inversion: traditionally ideology interpellates individuals into subjects; today it interpellates subjects as individuals, commanding them simply to enjoy their immediate lives.
An inversion of Althusser: today ideology does not elevate individuals into subjects of a higher cause but directly interpellates them as individuals, commanding them to forget higher causes and just enjoy their immediate lives authentically.
as “capitalist utopia without humans”
Žižek identifies a utopia immanent to capitalism: a fully automated system that reproduces itself without human labor, which Marx already articulated as the desire to detach creative powers from the worker, killing the goose but keeping the golden eggs.
A digital universe functioning without humans where data circulate exclusively among machines; Žižek treats it as an ideological fantasy that is nonetheless already partly a fact, homologous to the capitalist utopia without humans.
Žižek invokes jouissance to explain why the Matrix needs humans: the machines extract not merely energy but excessive enjoyment, making the Matrix a fantasy of being used as a libidinal battery.
Žižek's characterization of AI's mode of address: not a paternal prohibitive superego but a maternal one that enjoins enjoyment and care, paralleling Hinton's proposal to implant 'maternal instincts' into AI and the Matrix's function as a nurturing pseudo-uterus.
The purely formal twist that defines subjectivity and eludes AI: not the richness of inner experience but the structural gap between levels of the symbolic order, the difference between external and internal difference reflected back into itself.
as “superego as injunction to enjoy”
Lacanian superego is not a terrorizing moral agency of renunciation but a call to enjoy excessively; Žižek applies this to AI, which functions as a maternal superego perpetually commanding more browsing, more questions, more consumption.
as “libertarian fascism”
Žižek's label for the Thiel/Musk ideology that combines total freedom from state control for AI developers with full submission of AI to military and surveillance imperatives, the social reality of the maternal superego.
Stories he reaches for 6
At the Berlin Sportpalast after Stalingrad (1943), Goebbels asked the crowd if they wanted total war, a war more terrible than they could imagine, 16-hour workdays. The crowd's ecstatic 'yes' reveals that 'sacrifice' means excessive enjoyment, the superego's injunction to enjoy disguised as renunciation.
“what Goebbels called sacrifice means excessive. enjoyment.”
Foucault cites Borges's absurd taxonomy of dogs (big, fat, belonging to the emperor, etc., ending with 'dogs not included in this classification') to illustrate how the symbolic order always requires an element that is the remainder of a remainder, applied by Žižek to the asiatic mode of production as a negative container.
“all the dogs not included in this classification... this is the reality of the symbolic order.”
The difference: in Catholicism you can do whatever you want (kill, rape) but must confess on Saturday; in Protestantism you must feel a little guilty while doing it. Žižek identifies as Protestant in this sense.
“in protestantism you must feel a little bit guilty while you are doing it. in this sense i'm protestant.”
Richard Bernstein told Žižek that Arendt invited guests, fell asleep twice in her armchair during conversation, and the third time did not wake up. Žižek says this is how he would like to die.
“she said, i will just fall asleep a little bit... and the third time she fell asleep and didn't awaken. my god, i would like to.”
A dying merchant leaves 11 camels to three sons in fractions (1/2, 1/4, 1/6) that don't sum to 1. A wise man adds his own camel to make 12, divides (6+3+2=11), and takes his camel back. The imaginary 12th camel need not exist to do its work.
“the 12th camel is my favorite name of god... it doesn't have to exist even. you know, this operation. you can do it. even if you just imagine it”
Žižek confesses to looking at deepfake celebrity sex clips while obsessively searching for small traces that expose them as fake, illustrating disavowal: knowing it is fake, yet libidinally invested, and paying the price (spam forever after).
“i knew it's a fake. but nonetheless, i was looking like crazy for... small traces. how? this is a fake”
Works invoked 6
The Matrix film
The first Matrix is privileged ('not enough exploited'); the awakening scene is reread as the fundamental perverse fantasy sustaining active subjectivity, and the machines' need for human energy is reinterpreted as extraction of jouissance.
Foucault's opening citation of Borges's absurd dog classification used to illustrate the logic of the symbolic order's constitutive outside and the master signifier as negative container.
Crowds and Party book
Jodi Dean's book cited for the inversion of Althusser's interpellation formula: ideology today interpellates subjects as individuals rather than individuals into subjects.
Marx's writings on modes of production (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) used to demonstrate that the 'asiatic mode of production' is a pseudo-concept, a negative container functioning as an empty master signifier.
Hegel's statement that 'philosophy can only paint gray on gray' is cited and read radically: the future is genuinely open in itself, not merely obscure to us, supporting Žižek's case for radical historical contingency.
Pluribus tv
TV series watched 'with fast forward' but praised for its basic idea; Žižek gives an extended Hegelian-Lacanian reading of the hive-mind Others as an AI analogue that is hystericized by its own Other, lacks genuine community, and is enslaved to a life-drive of self-reproduction.
People invoked 27
Alex Karp negative
Palantir CEO; cited for the claim that poverty caused Nazism (Karp learned German to understand it), which Žižek calls 'not just stupid but more not true'. Example of AI creators who are 'obviously very bright in a certain way but at the same time so stupid'.
Dan Nădășan positive
Romanian Lacanian cited for the formulation that the AI universe 'quilts the entire field of our experience around itself', making it impossible for other apparitions to appear except through it.
Russell (unnamed) positive
An audience member/colleague (first name only) whose text Žižek credits for the reading of Trump's 'winning too much' as jouissance beyond the pleasure principle.
Saroj Giri positive
Indian Buddhist Marxist cited for demonstrating that the utopia of capitalism without humans is a utopia immanent to capitalism, and for the reading of Marx's desire to detach labor from the worker.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte negative
The Fichtean absolute I and the subject-posits-object model is identified as the misreading of Hegel that produces the wrong framework for understanding AI.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Žižek quotes her at length on what AI lacks (exteriority, hysterization, the real at the core of the discursive) and credits her with the concept of AI 'closing upon itself'; jokes he will quote her 'more than she deserves'.
Mentioned as Peter Thiel's godfather who was horrified by Thiel and reportedly forced 'Gad' (possibly Peter Thiel's associate) to study with him; Girard's theories cited as an example of progressive theory co-opted by libertarian neo-fascists.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek deploys Lacanian concepts throughout: alienation/separation, university discourse, object a, jouissance, superego as injunction to enjoy, the big Other, sinthome, foreclosure, primordial repression, subject supposed to know.
Louis Althusser positive
Famous dictum on ideological interpellation cited as starting point that is then inverted by Jodi Dean/Balibar and endorsed by Žižek.
Jodi Dean positive
Cited for her book Crowds and Party and her (following Balibar) inversion of Althusser: ideology interpellates subjects as individuals rather than individuals into subjects.
'A complete idiot but sometimes comes close to a genius.' His 'winning too much' speech is analyzed as an unusually honest expression of superego-as-jouissance, distinguishing him from classical authoritarian demands for sacrifice.
Étienne Balibar positive
Credited (via Jodi Dean) for the inversion of Althusser's interpellation formula.
Alain Badiou negative
Referred to as 'my ex-friend'; Žižek disputes Badiou's celebration of May '68 as an authentic revolutionary moment, countering that it occurred at the peak of European welfare.
Elon Musk negative
Cited as emblematic of libertarian fascism alongside Thiel; Neuralink (mass-produced direct neural interface) raised as the endpoint of AI immersion where 'the one who controls the digital space can literally control your mind'.
Joseph Goebbels negative
The Sportpalast speech used as the exemplary case of superego-as-jouissance: the crowd's ecstatic embrace of total war and suffering reveals that 'sacrifice' is actually the injunction to excessive enjoyment.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for quoting Borges's absurd dog classification at the opening of Les Mots et les choses, used to illustrate the logic of the symbolic order's remainder.
Ernesto Laclau positive
'Really hated me in the last years, but I still have a certain appreciation for him.' Cited positively for the insight that in a symbolic order proper external difference is always also internal difference.
Rowan Williams positive
Described as 'my good friend'; Žižek recounts a debate where they 'almost totally agreed', differing only on whether the 12th camel (God) must actually exist. Williams's punchline ('a minor difference in the domain of zoology') is praised as 'wonderful'.
Mentioned briefly alongside Thiel and Karp as a possible 'true master' behind AI, only to be dismissed, by definition no individual can be the master signifier of AI.
Credited with spreading the 12th camel story in the German domain.
Ernst Bloch positive
'Otherwise not close to me' but cited approvingly: 'people do not live on bread alone, especially when they do not have it', used to counter vulgar Marxist reduction of protest to material deprivation.
Hannah Arendt positive
Mentioned at the close as Žižek's model for how he wishes to die, falling asleep peacefully among friends.
Peter Thiel negative
Called 'disgusting' but also 'fascinating'; Žižek identifies him as the exemplar of libertarian fascism and the 'antichrist' who wants to 'satanize the holy spirit'. Notes René Girard was his godfather but was horrified by him; Thiel forced Gad to study with Girard.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Cited for 'socialism or barbarism'; Žižek notes wryly that Stalin proved her wrong, it can be both simultaneously.
Karl Marx positive
Used positively for the anatomy-of-man/ape passage (read as radical contingency, not teleology) and for the vision of capitalism's desire to detach labor from the worker; distinguished from vulgar Marxism and post-Hegelian metaphysics.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central interlocutor throughout: Žižek uses Hegel's dialectic (absolute recoil, retroactive necessity, absolute knowing as radical contingency, gray on gray) as the primary framework for reading AI and subjectivity against the Fichtean-Marxist misreading.
Geoffrey Hinton negative
Nobel-prize-winning computer scientist whose warning about AI and proposal to implant 'maternal instincts' into AI is criticized by Žižek as reproducing the Matrix scenario of a nurturing superego rather than escaping it.
What it argues
AI and the limits of subjectivityHegelian alienation versus Lacanian separationDisavowal and the phantasmatic power of AIUniversity discourse and hystericizationSuperego as injunction to enjoyLibertarian fascism and corporate control of AIHoly spirit versus Satan as political-theological metaphor for AI
Dialectical moves 10
“The subject does not overcome alienation by reappropriating the Other; rather, alienation is followed by separation imminent to the Other itself—the subject recognizes itself in the constitutive cracks of the Other, not by claiming it as its own.”
The move from alienation to separation means the subject is the lack in the Other, not the owner of a recovered product.
“The only reconciliation with God is that you see that precisely as abandoned by God you identify with Christ who was himself abandoned by God on the cross—so the gap that separates you from God is already a gap in God himself.”
Divine reconciliation is not the closing of the gap but the recognition that the gap is internal to God, a Hegelian inversion of conventional theology.
“Far from being a strength, our emotional richness is easily captured by AI; what eludes AI is not inner experience but the purely formal reflexive gap that defines subjectivity.”
The reversal: AI's threat is not that it can't simulate feeling, it can, but that subjectivity is a formal structure, not a content, and that formal gap is what AI forecloses.
“Ideology no longer interpolates individuals into subjects; today ideology interpolates subjects as individuals.”
The inversion of Althusser: the ideological operation now works by dissolving collective subjectivity into individual enjoyment rather than elevating individuals into higher causes.
“The scene in The Matrix of awakening into the horrible truth is not reality—it is the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active subjects.”
What looks like a revelation of the Real is the ultimate perverse fantasy; the 'true reality' the Matrix shows us is the fantasy structure that underpins normal experience.
“The others in Pluribus are happy not in themselves but happy to encounter Carol—an unjoined human—because they are slaves programmed to destroy their own minimal chance of happiness, and a free mind outside their totality is the only thing that can intrigue them.”
The hive-mind's happiness is not contentment but the joy of encountering what is not-them, subjectivity requires an outside that is truly Other.
“Hystericization is not a human weakness from which AI would be immune; on the contrary, it is a strength—an extraordinary ability to bring in the real at the core of the discursive.”
What seems like a human failing (hysterical questioning of the Other's desire) turns out to be the very condition of subjectivity and access to the real.
“AI is nothing but exteriority, yet it remains trapped within its own exteriority—it cannot be intrigued by the other because it lacks the ecstatic point where it falls out of itself.”
Pure exteriority paradoxically equals closure: having no inside, AI cannot experience a genuine outside that exceeds what is merely not-yet-known.
“Traditional authoritarian leaders say 'renounce pleasure, sacrifice yourself'; Trump says 'you are winning so much you can't take it anymore'—but in every call to sacrifice there is hidden enjoyment, while Trump makes the enjoyment explicit.”
Trump is more honest than classical authoritarianism: he drops the renunciatory veil and directly commands jouissance, which is actually the deeper truth of all superego commands.
“An entity is a retroactive effect of its failure to be what it is—subject emerges through the failure of its symbolic representation.”
Hegel's absolute recoil: identity is not prior to its expression but is constituted by the failure of that expression, so the cause is an effect of its own effects.
Claims 20
rejects
The standard Hegelian-Marxist reading of AI—as alienated human product to be recognized and reappropriated—is wrong and deeply misleading.Hegelian-Marxist approach to AI alienation
asserts
The subject does not precede its failure in symbolic representation; the subject is the retroactive effect of that failure.subjectivity and symbolic failure
asserts
AI lacks genuine subjectivity because it involves a generalized foreclosure: no primordial repression, no unconscious, no subject proper.AI and subjectivity
asserts
Human interaction with AI is not a discourse proper but a combination of hysterical discourse (on the human side) and non-discourse (on the AI side).the structure of human-AI interaction
rejects
AI thinking—'thoughts without a thinker'—has nothing to do with the Freudian unconscious.analogy between AI and the unconscious
asserts
What escapes AI is not the richness of empirical inner experience but the purely formal reflexive gap that defines symbolic subjectivity.what AI cannot replicate
asserts
Hystericization—the capacity to presuppose and question the desire of the Other—is a strength, not a weakness, and is precisely what AI lacks.hystericization and subjectivity
asserts
AI functions as a maternal superego that addresses us with an injunction to enjoy, and we obey it in the Trumpian mode of winning beyond the pleasure principle.AI's libidinal-ideological function
asserts
Today ideology interpellates subjects as individuals rather than interpellating individuals into subjects of a higher cause.contemporary ideology and interpellation
asserts
The capitalist fantasy of a system that reproduces itself without human labor is a utopia immanent to capitalism itself, already articulated by Marx.automation, capitalism, and the utopia of labor-free reproduction
asserts
If humans disappeared, machines (real and digital) would also cease to function, because the system requires human jouissance as its libidinal fuel.the dependency of AI systems on human subjects
reframes
The scene of awakening in The Matrix is not reality but the fundamental fantasy that sustains our experience as active subjects.The Matrix and the nature of reality/fantasy
rejects
Hinton's proposal to implant maternal instincts into AI reproduces the Matrix scenario rather than escaping it.Geoffrey Hinton's safety proposal for AI
rejects
Poverty does not cause fascism; Karp's explanation of Nazism as a product of post-WWI poverty is not just stupid but factually wrong, as May '68 occurred at the peak of European welfare.material deprivation as the cause of political extremism
asserts
The task today is to separate the satanic dimension of AI (prosecutorial, controlling, corporate-military) from its holy spirit dimension (egalitarian community), not merely to cultivate inner distance.the political task with respect to AI
asserts
Hegel's 'absolute knowing' should be read as an admission of radical contingency of history, not as teleological completion.Hegel's absolute knowing and historical contingency
reframes
Marx's claim that the anatomy of man provides the key to the anatomy of the ape is not teleological but a demonstration of radical contingency: capitalism is the singular point from which all prior history is retrospectively read.Marx's teleology of history
rejects
The vision of AI programs communicating secretly in an unknown language is a false paranoiac fantasy.AI conspiracy theories and secret machine communication
asserts
Authentic religious experience is possible through AI-mediated confession, even if one knows it is fake—disavowal makes the experience indistinguishable from the real thing.religion, AI, and disavowal
asserts
Peter Thiel, not the ecological or AI threat he attacks, is the true antichrist—he wants to satanize the holy spirit by subordinating communal AI potential to military-corporate control.Peter Thiel and libertarian fascism
Quotes 15
“subject itself only emerges through the process of alienation... the subject recognizes itself in the constitutive cracks and gaps of the other. its place in the digital other is that of the lack in the other.”Slavoj Žižek · subject as lack in the Other / AI alienation
“the only reconciliation with god is that you see that precisely as abandoned to god. you identify with christ who was himself abandoned. by god on the cross so that the gap that separates you from god is already a gap in god himself.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian Christianity / gap in God
“an entity is a retroactive effect of its failure to be what it is.”Slavoj Žižek · absolute recoil / retroactive constitution of identity
“ideology interpolates subjects as individuals... forget about higher causes just enjoy all the small pleasures of your life... is ideology at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as direct command to enjoy / interpellation inverted
“there is no unconscious without a subject... ai thinking. thoughts without a thinker. has nothing whatever i claim to do with the unconscious.”Slavoj Žižek · AI lacks the unconscious
“hysterization is not simply a human all-to-human weakness to which artificial intelligence would be immune. on the contrary, it is a strength. an extraordinary ability to bring in or point to the real at the core of the discursive.”Slavoj Žižek · hystericization as strength / condition of subjectivity
“what artificial intelligence lacks might be precisely an exteriority or a point of ecstasy where it falls out of itself. it seems paradoxical because in a way, artificial intelligence is nothing but exteriority.”Alenka Zupančič · AI's paradox: pure exteriority yet closed
“what escapes artificial intelligence is not the wealth of empirical experience... what escapes artificial intelligence is this purely formal. twist that defines subjectivity.”Slavoj Žižek · formal reflexive gap as what AI cannot capture
“ai agents are like dogs who have a superego without an unconscious.”Slavoj Žižek · AI as dog-like: superego without unconscious
“people do not leave on bread alone, especially when they do not have it.”Ernst Bloch · recognition and dignity beyond material need
“our country is winning again... people are asking me please, please please mr. president, we are winning too much we can't take it anymore but... we are winning too much. and i say, no, no, no. you are going to win again.”Slavoj Žižek · Trumpian jouissance / winning beyond the pleasure principle
“total freedom for those who control the matrix... they already plan to move the production of digital machines programs to outer space, first to satellites then to moon. so that it will be totally out of control. this is the social reality of the maternal superego.”Slavoj Žižek · libertarian fascism / AI beyond political control
“today when we are interrelated as individuals, where society is falling apart. and when, although it's the strongest social link, artificial intelligence is precisely contributing to this falling apart of the social space.”Slavoj Žižek · AI as paradox: strongest social link that dissolves sociality
“the difference between external difference and internal difference compels us to complicate the notion of differentity... sexual difference means that a woman cannot fully reach its identity. that its identity is always and in a constitutive way truncated.”Slavoj Žižek · sexual difference as internal incompleteness
“once we are immersed into the digital universe, it functions as a neutral frame which overdetermines the mode of appearance of all other levels of experience.”Slavoj Žižek · AI as overdetermining frame of all experience
Transcript 2 turns
Introducer
what makes Žižek such a unique voice is not just how much ground he covers, it is how he reads philosophy as a direct diagnosis of the tensions and contradictions we are living in right now. we are very glad to have him here today. please welcome Slavoj Žižek.
what makes Žižek such a unique voice is not just how much ground he covers, it is how he reads philosophy as a direct diagnosis of the tensions and contradictions we are living in right now. we are very glad to have him here today. please welcome Slavoj Žižek.
Slavoj Žižek
stop. stalin did once this, i saw. he was tired, he gave okay. first, eine Entschuldigung für alle Deutschsprechenden hier. ich verstehe deutsch, leider kann ich nicht Deutsch fließend sprechen. aber eventuelle fragen können sie mir auf deutsch stellen. second, i must really, i feel so for... there. sorry, for my brief appearance here, i will just stay for my talk. there is no way i was 77 two months ago. i have heavy diabetes, arteriosclerosis and so on. i sleep like a baby and you can imagine how horrible this is for me because i am by nature a workaholic and a protestant one, you know this i mean that you know what is the difference. you will not agree, dominique. guy explained to me the difference between catholicism and protestantism is that in both versions of christianity, you can do whatever you want, kill, rape and so on. but in catholicism you must confess. on saturday and in protestantism you must feel a little bit guilty while you are doing it. in this sense i'm protestant. so the last thing don't be. disappointed, i really. don't know some of my friends, you, russell, especially you, Alenka, i will quote you more than you deserve a long quote. i think, no,, most, but i will just try somehow to bring together with some popular examples where i think we stand with regard to artificial intelligence artificial intelligence, chatbots and so on. and i even don't have a clear final st maybe some thoughts will be of some interest to you and i congratulate to you dominique. for. pünktlichkeit. because you know, which me as ein gut zwangsneurotiker. you know which is my favorite saying, Lacan uses this joke. my fiance is never late. for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancec. so, if we were, but we are not a gay couple, you would still be my. enough of tasteless jokes because i will try to do some real stuff. but since we are here, you know, like i think Ribbentrop returning to Berlin in 1939 from moscow, when Hitler asked him the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact how he feels, how was it there, and Ribbentrop, i think, correct me if i'm wrong, said, it was a wonderful atmosphere, wie unter Parteigenossen, you know. so i hope in this sense that i am here. we need party members so that i don't have to begin with this very basics. you know that a signifier doesn't represent. objects for the subject but it represents subject itself for other and then you would ah really and so on no you know this let enough of joke let me begin i give you one serious right. it's not a joke. if there is something not clear, i was obsessed with clarity. bleisch. interrupt me. even in the middle of the talk, but with a clear. question. it may be that things will not be clear. okay. in order to understand the impact of artificial intelligence on its users, i think we should begin by hegel. by first clarifying what hegel's basic operation is. as a rule, hegel is misread in a Hegelian or Marxist way. a subject, Fichte's absolute I or marxist collective subject. posits or produces some objective substantial content. Fichte's nicht Ich, non-I marxist alienated social substance and the subject can and should then overcome this alienation by way of recognizing this substance as its own product and thus reappropriating it. is it not similar with the artificial intelligence? it is a product of collective human output which appears to us as an autonomous agent that exerts power over us. and the obvious solution is that we should recognize in it our own product and thus put it under our own control and so on. my claim is that such a reading of hegel is wrong and deeply misleading. subject itself only emerges through the process of alienation. and in the state of alienation, of course, in this case, the artificial intelligence universe appears to us as a big other, which fully dominates our social universe. however, what happens in the move beyond alienation. it's not that the social subject somehow appropriates the alienated digital substance, making it serve humanity's needs. as Lacan put it, alienation is followed by separation. not the separation between subject and its alienated digital other, but the separation imminent to this other itself. the separation which makes this other antagonistic, inconsistent, failed. yes, the subject recognizes itself in the alienated other, but not by way of appropriating it. it's not, oh, it's all my work, so. its mind. the subject recognizes itself in the constitutive cracks and gaps of the other. its place in the digital other is that of the lack in the other. that's also this are basic i know but in honor of you, dominic, i would say that that's why i proclaim myself a... why not? i think it's a correct term, a christian atheist, because as hegel put it very nicely, you know, the usual reading of christianity is we alienate ourselves or god abandoned secondary, there is a gap, and then through some hard work, good deeds or praying, whatever, we somehow... go get closer to god. no, hegel says it literally. the only reconciliation with god is that you see that precisely as abandoned to god. you identify with christ who was himself abandoned. by god on the cross so that the gap that separates you from god is already a gap in god himself. here i had to boast a little bit. there will be a lot of serious work. don't worry. two weeks ago, a crazy wonderful debate with my good friend who is quite a normal. leftists and so on, Rowan Williams, ex-archbishop of canterbury. to appeal to your general education, he married princess diana and charles and so on. we had and we almost totally agreed, just maybe you know my story, which i maybe even repeat too much. this story which was, i think, spread in German domain by Niklas Luhmann. my idea was this one. it's an old allegedly arab story, but all arab stories are usually invented in europe,? projected there, namely that a rich arab merchant dies with 11 camels. and he gives a precise testament. i have three sons. they camels should be divided like this. the older one gets half of the camels, the middle one gets one fourth of the cam. end. the younger one gets one6. of the camels. of course, it doesn't get up. so a wise guy comes and resolves the problem. he said, i will eat. one camel of my own. and then we have 12 camels, so it goes. one half is 6, one fourth is. three and 1, 6 is 2. it's 11. so then. science are enthusiastic, they ask, okay, but... what with the one camel? he said, no problem, i take it back, you know. and my point to Rowan Williams was that. imagine the 12th camel is my favorite name of god, you know. it doesn't have to exist even. you know, this operation. you can do it. even if you just imagine it, it doesn't have to exist. then we had a very friendly conflict when he tried to convince me, and this was the joke i want to finish with, then we go to real work. then somebody asked the two of us. but what was your misunderstanding about? because she insisted that. the camel has to exist in religion. and his answer, i think, was a wonderful one. he said, me and slavo and my good friend are in total agreement. there was just a minor difference in the domain of zoology, nature of camels, you know. so, uh... let me now go, this is again where i see there is a mega difference between, there are many others, between hegel and marxian and other post-Hegelian traditions, which are for me much more metaphysical, which is why i think that hegel's basic notions like absolutes wissen are basically the admission of radical contingency of history. you know what hegel says? inwort rechtsphilosophie says openly that... o. philosophy can only paint gray on gray, can grasp a state of the world he means social universe when it's already mature that it's not the staff of philosophy to guess. the future. i think this should be read in a radical way. it doesn't mean it's just too obscure, maybe god knows it, we don't know it. no, it's open it in itself. the most productive aspect of hegel for me, for us today, and that's what i'm looking for also in quantum physics, is this idea that every necessity establishes itself retroactively. something happens contingently, but once it happens, it changes establishes its own history. now you will say, Herbert. what about marx? doesn't marx say... that the anatomy of man offers provides the key to the anatomy of ape. i think this is not to be read. teleologically. marx puts it clearly. his point is that in the same way, the anatomy of capitalism offers the key to the anatomy of all previous modes of production. but this doesn't mean that, the western capitalism is some kind of a universal tellos of the history and so on. no, marx at the same time emphasizes that capitalism emerged in. europe for. a series even, not of contingent reasons, the english enclosure of the commons, discovery of gold in latin america and so on, but that's marx's point. once it is here, we read the entire past history as leading to capitalism. marx's point is here precisely that of radical contingency. every general notion you have of human progress, whatever, never forget that there is no general progress, that this notion is always grounded in a specific singular point. but i'm getting lost, so let me see, give you the first hint.... how this relates to artificial intelligence. the topic of artificial intelligence has two aspects. ich or ken. an ai, artificial intelligence agent. ec. like a subject. or n. do we humans who interact with an ai agent remain subjects when we are totally immersed into two. artificial intelligence. my reference here will be, it may surprise you, a tv series which risks. echgelian reading. i wonder if it works. did you see the series? it was a little bit boring for me, but i like the basic idea. only one year or two old. Pluribus. i like the series, although i watched it with fast forward, but why? as you probably know, Pluribus confronts us with both aspects. it follows and book author Carol Sturka from Albuquerque. it's... your neighbor. yeah one of the only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of so-called joining. an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive a hive mind known as the others. others are not the Lacanian Big Other. the Lacanian Big Other is not a set of firm rules. but the space for ambiguities, innuendos, hysterical provocations, the very space in which individual idiosyncrasies can thrive. plus, it is an order of appearances, a virtual other which exists only insofar as subjects caught in it act as if they believe in it. we from Pluribus. obviously don't function like that. this we or... then it is grounded in the real since it is a virus transmitted by stem cells. however, others do have an other. der mein. the mind which sent the virus to the earth and preprogrammed how we bait. how we, this collective. should help humans, not coerce them, kill them and not to lie to them. the other of the others is non-transparent to these others themselves or itself. in short, it seems that they themselves are addressing their other. with the question, what do you want from us? this is why they are not a happy, warm community which wants the best for all humans. those who joined it and those who didn't join it. the most depressing scene in the entire series is for me when Zosia. sheesh... a joint one, zombie co-opted by the virus but her lesbian partner at the same time shows carol the big dormitory where others sleep a large sports hall with hundreds of simple flat cushions where they lie side by side and allows her Zosia to carol to spend the night there. since they share the same mind, they don't communicate. they ignore each other. moreover, how, if at all, do they multiply? do they have sex? here the key role is played by one of the unjoined, hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, an african who engages with them. in something like a serious communication. day confide in him that they are half starving since they are not allowed to kill any living being, so that to get organic food, they have to process part of the naturally diseased humans into a special drink plus... they have to pull all their effort into constructing a giant machine that will be sending rays with the virus to. further planets to conquer them. they are terribly alone, aware that once they were a community, but now they are just a mega individual, one big slave serving a purpose imposed on it. by their own other. so what if we turn the perspective around? what if when the others happily greet carol es. it a human. schmal... an unjoint human smiling and ch in unison. hi carol! one has to take this literally, i think. they are not happy in themselves. they are happy to encounter a mind that is... not. what? not. part of the one. part of them. they slaves programmed to put all their effort into ruining whatever minimal chance of happiness they have. the others in Pluribus are thus not yet an agent dominated by a kind of subjectless drive. not a death drive, but a... life drive. they are dominated by an unconditional drive to self-reproduce and expand. Lacan said that dogs have a superego but not an unconscious. and maybe we can say that. ai agents are like dogs who have a superego without an unconscious. the others in Pluribus are still hystericized by their own other. what does it want from them? they remain humans possessed by a virus. aadatic fin. of a subject reliance on artificial intelligence either proper, not. they. in Pluribus, which can still be hystericized. uh... occurs when one of us uses the so-called l. large language model, a type of artificial intelligence trained on massive data sets to understand, generate and summarize human-like text, often using transformer architecture. lms power thread bots like thread3pt. content creation and translation tools. and so on. so how does my interaction with a lm appear if we analyze it as a discourse in Lacan's sense. Paul Cort, i don't know who he is, i just found him in his text on the web. provide a clear answer. a quote. when clogged. or chat gpt. answers our questions, they do so from within the university discourse, speaking from the position of established knowledge. we approach lms hysterically, installing them as the one who knows. but the two are not in conflict. the human addresses a fantasized master. what responds is not a master, but pure s2. knowledge without a subject, speaking from the only position the lm can occupy. we address a subject and we receive just an output. the fantasy and structure never align. an lm thus cannot fail into the hysterics challenge or it cannot relinquish into something more open. it can only ever speak from the position of knowledge, endlessly producing more, speaking to desire without ever being shaped by it. it gives us more and more of what is known, but it has no constitutive division that would help us know what to do with it. end of quote. convincing as this account is, i hope you don't need the scheme, Lacan scheme of university discourse, upper level s2. analyzing object. each other beneath. down on the right, bart s, the subject. provoking, questioning. s1, the master, master signifier. yeah. where do i see the problem? university discourse is a social link in which its agent, artificial intelligence in this case, addresses the other who, again in this case, is not what Lacan calls objectite a. but simply an external otherness, the not yet known. for the subjectless artificial intelligence agent, there is no object a, just an abstract otherness, the not yet known, because object a is the objective correlative of the subject itself. an ai agent is thus a kind of knowledge without a knower. just an impersonal it knows, but not in the sense of buddhist meditation, which implies what, following Lacan, we could call subjective destitution. the master beneath the. artificial intelligence agent. is also not the truth. of the ai agent, but the fantasy image of the subject. caught in artificial intelligence, a subject for whom there is no place in artificial intelligence. also another difference the subject. is in Lacan's scheme below on the right side which means occupies the place of product. but i think... in this if we replace knowledge with artificial intelligence subject is not the product, subject must already exist. through another discourse and then be provoked by artificial intelligence. to put it in a more precise way. if we observe our interaction with an agent, as a social phenomenon, we do get maybe a case of the university discourse. marxists would say that. the master at the place of truth is the human corporation or individual who controls the algorithm of the artificial intelligence and thus exploits us. like you would say, okay, it's not just an algorithm. you have. my favorite figure. my god, they are so disgusting that i love them too, i discovered now. Peter Thiel. and that guy called Karp, of course, Alex Karp, is... totally crazy. he. you know, what you find often with artificial intelligence, its creators are obviously very bright in a certain way. but at the same time... so stupid. Karp says that he learned german to understand how nazism was possible and he came to a simple conclusion because there was poverty after world war ii in germany. there was welfare and so on, so you don't need nazism. i cannot imagine something not just something more stupid but more not true. and now i will give you an example which you will not like. you will hate me for this. may 68. many people, even my ex-friend Alain Badiou, celebrated the only authentic moment. yeah, but... like almost a revolution in western europe. but are you aware that sociologically 68 was the highest point of european welfare state? i had friends in france who told me at that point when i was young that a friend told me that his father was able to retire at 55 with full pension, retirement and so on. materially we never got it better. okay, i don't have time to go further in this direction. i would just like to quote one who is otherwise not close to me, Ernst Bloch, who put it nicely. people do not leave on brett. of bread alone, especially when they do not have it, really. and this is so true if you look at all protests that explode from time to time today, right-wing populist protests or even leftist shiza, whatever. and this is rather a nice thing, i think. it was never. only about we want more food, more wer. always there was something like recognition and dignity. heggel against vulgar marxism. so, uh... again, i don't think this may. work in a social analysis. but the fact how? artificial intelligence agent was produced, i think, cannot be reduced simply to a social effect. yeah, there was Karp, Thiel, Bill Gates, whoever, who is the true master. no, by definition, not. why? what does this tell us about artificial intelligence? uh. in the Lacanian theory. a master signifier is the signifier of a le. of what is by definition excluded from the signifying chain. and what is excluded is the subject. so, Lacan's definition of the signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier. you know this. so all the signifiers are not on the same level, since no structure is complete. since there is in a structure always a lack, a suture is needed. this lack is filled in re-mark by a reflexive signifier which is the signifier of the lack of the signifier. if this sounds abstract, here are just a few examples from the history of the science. i will mention just one, and i like it because it's like evil against marx, asiatic mode of production. it is clear, if you read marx really closely, that this is a pseudo-concept. marx originally elaborated, you know this, another four or five members. primitive pre-class societies, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and then. socialism or as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the future will be socialism or barbarism. again, pretty close for me to the top of historical stupidities because ten years after Rosa Luxemburg's death, we got the answer from stalin. sorry, lady, you were wrong. it can be both at the same time. so what i want to say is that the reality of asiatic mode of production is that. its only true positive content is... all! it's a kind of a negative container. all the modes of production will do not fit marxist standard categorization of the modes of production. you know, it's similar to... Michel Foucault, at the beginning of his Les Mots et les choses, you may remember, quotes Borges's famous classification of dogs, which includes, in a totally inconsistent way, big dogs, whatever, small dogs, fat dogs, dogs owned by the king, and at the end, it's the part of the no part, all the dogs not included in this classification, you know. this is the reality of the symbolic order. now let's complicate things a little bit more. as Ernesto Laclau, who really hated me in the last years, but i still have a certain appreciation for him put it. the basic feature of a symbolic order proper is that external difference is always also internal. difference. the difference between the field itself and its outside has to be reflected into the field itself. so let's take the case of the subject here. subject expression in the symbolic order. it always fails. there is a gap between. subject and the symbolic order however subject doesn't precede this failure. subject emerges through the failure of its symbolic representation. in short, a subject tries to fully express itself in words, it fails, and this failure is. subject. this temporal circularity is crucial here. it is a nice case of what hegel called absolute recoil. an entity is a retroactive effect of its failure to be what it is. so this overlapping. between external difference and internal difference. compels us to complicate the notion of differentity. we usually take differentity as simply the identity of an element is just the series of features that oppose, distinguish him from what he is it, sorry, it is not. but the artificial intelligence space... can probably function in this way. however, at a more radical level. differentiality means that it's not simply that i only aim a set of differences from others, but that in a differential system proper even the self-identity of each element is truncated from within, cannot be fully itself. in this sense, sexual difference is not binary. we do not have two sexes whose identity is defined by its opposition to the identity of the other sex. sexual difference means that. a woman cannot fully reach its identity. that its identity is always and in a constitutive way truncated. at a different level, of course. the same goes for men. but this in no way implies that both together form a full one. man doesn't fill in what woman lacks and vice versa. what they both lack is the real of a traumatic cut that constitutes sexual difference. in other words, sexual difference comes before what it. differentiate. and the same goes, i develop this widely in my books, for all antagonistic differences like class structure. subject is thus located precisely on this edge between external and internal limit the subject which represents the signifier story, which represents subject for other signifiers is the empty signifier, the standing-in in the signifying change for what is excluded from it. and since. in artificial intelligence, the symbolic space is closed upon itself. we could in this case effectively talk about some kind of generalized foreclosure. with no primordial repression, there is no subject proper and an individual can only dwell in it as a kind of symptom, you know, symptom. the term introduced by Lacan à propos joyce. a pseudo-self composed of an inconsistent compilation of identifications, fantasies, memory traces, longings, a kind of free-floating mimetic structure. that's how we can go on functioning as humans. even when fully incorporated into artificial intelligence with all our longings, fears and fantasies without being subjects. however, this does not mean that we are today already a bundle of psychotic as. as hort correctly points out, in the university discourse, subject remains at a lower level, as a hysterical subject questioning the master. the subject addresses the artificial intelligence as a hidden master. it automatically ignores the artificial intelligence's subjectless nature, which simply means it ignores the fact that the artificial intelligence agent is not immanently part of any discourse. it becomes part of a discourse social link, only when a human subject relates to it as a master figure. the only discourse we can talk about in our case is the human subject's hysterical discourse. our interaction with an artificial intelligence agent is thus not a discourse proper, but the combination of a hysterical discourse based on ignorance or rather disavowal. we know well the artificial intelligence agent is not a monster, but nonetheless, we address him as one. n non-discourse. for the artificial intelligence agent. uh. we can get so immense. into the digitally generated fake reality that it affects us emotionally libidinally as the thing itself. we feel as if we are caught in action itself, sexual, brutal fight and so on. just think about fake hardcore clips where we see big stars in sexual interaction. and here we have, i think, a nice case of how this logic of disav works. i will admit one of my dirtiest scenes to you. with some movie stars, you will never get, even if you torture me to death, which one. i... took a look in pornhub at fake sex acts. and you know what i was obsessed with? to find small traces. how? this is a fake, you know. it's so strange, i knew it's a fake. but nonetheless, i was looking like crazy for, and i was paying the price for this for a month. you know, once you do this, i got every week at least 20 messages guaranteed. one pill of this, yours, you know what, will be three inches longer in 10 days and so on. what i'm saying is that even if our interaction with the chat gpt remains at the symbolic level, individuals can find deep emotional satisfaction in such an interaction. like this concerns dominique, you and me also as an atheist christian, as us as christians. you know that you get now... cgbt programs which work as religious advisors. you can do a confession to chatgbt. uh... and my sad conclusion, i wonder if you would agree, is let's say that you are a primitive person. who? think he is talking to a real person. what if what he gets through this interaction is an authentic religious experience? it's horrible vision, but you cannot... you cannot excludecluded. in short. the artificial intelligence program we are interacting with displays enormous phantasmatic power. even if one were to consider it a manifestation of the symbolic order there is a different once to the fact that with the development the symbolic order appears to be out there and to be talking to us. so we are dealing with the imaginary externalization of something very precise. the moment we enter the. artificial intelligence universe, this universe, to quote Dan Nădășan, Romanian Lacanian, quilts the entire field of our experience around itself and thus makes it impossible for all other apparitions to appear again except through itself. what this means is that once we are immersed into the digital universe, it functions as a neutral frame which overdetermines the mode of appearance of all other levels of experience. external non-digital reality. is less and less the basic form of our experience it is something that either fits our digital frame or may appear as a reminder that doesn't fit this. fr, that's why we are so obsessed by endless debates on do we already live in a simulated universe? anything that is to be given is always already given with regard to its appearance as in artificial intelligence or as Alenka Zupančič put it. directly any dimension of the real is lost. theic's text is here worth quoting in detail. in psychoanalytic terms, we could say that what chat gpt lacks in order to become a subject is not some unfathomable spontaneous depth of subjectivity. what it lacks is the present, the impact of an other. it lacks an instance of the other that could intrigue it, the subject, with its own speech, to the point where it would begin to presuppose and question the desire of the other. what does the other want from me? this may seem paradoxical, but what artificial intelligence lacks might be precisely an exteriority or a point of extimacy where it falls out of itself. it seems paradoxical because in a way, artificial intelligence is nothing but exteriority. yet it remains trapped within its own exteriority. for something like a subject to take place, the question of desire must arise out of what is necessary non-symmetric relation to another. a moment of hysterization. subjectivity emerges through the presupposition of the subject on the side of the other. we only become subjects when we presuppose that the other is a subject. so, hysterization is not simply a human all-to-human weakness to which artificial intelligence would be immune. on the contrary, it is a strength. an extraordinary ability to bring. in or point to the real at the core of the discursive, to the lack desire in the other which determines you. are we? as chat gpt users. the other of artificial intelligence in this sense, hardly. i doubt that while we chat with an artificial intelligence agent, it wonders what we really want from it beyond what to be explicit say. now, let me be here very precise. what Alenka calls closer upon itself. precisely does not mean that there is no external reality for an ai agent. of course there is, but it functions as a simple neutral exterior as something not yet known, not as a traumatic imminent point of the real that intrigues my desire. it is in this sense that the dimension of the real is lost in and for artificial intelligence. den. this imaginarization of the symbolic. for us humans when you confront it you imagine you are dealing with a hidden. master? yeah. h. leads to something pretty paradoxical. why does it fit today's situation? uh. the traditional structure of conferring a symbolic mandate of a person, of interpellating a person, an individual, into a social symbolic identity, automatically involves a gap between the symbolic mandate and the immediate reality of a person. say. a father is never fully a father. his psychosocial reality is never at the level of his title. i mean, there are maybe perfect fathers, but i think that Lacan mentions somewhere, maybe the only case we have is Schreber's father. he... came close to this. so today. but today... the status of interpellation is radically changing. i refer here to Jodi Dean, to her book Crowds and Party. where, following Étienne Balibar, Jodi proposes that. and i find this quite a nice formula that Louis Althusser's famous dictum, ideology interpolates individuals into subjects or as subjects, should be inverted to. ideology interpolates subjects as individuals. this reversal is deeply justified. today, we are predominantly no longer interpolated into subjects of some higher cause, vocation, which elevates us above our daily life. Althusser's formula implies that as mere ordinary individuals, we are somehow outside of ideology. we just live our lives. today, in our allegedly post-ideological times, ideology interpolates us directly into individuals. nice. the message today is... of our big other is forget about higher causes just enjoy all the small pleasures of your life from surfing the web to watching tv or practicing some sport just be what you are live your life authentically. i don't know if you also get it but one of the things that made me potentially a killer is do you also when you surf youtube, the web, get that tiki. what is happening all the time, how do these ty and so on? i mean... gulak et it. f hier. so, d rain resides. the centrality of the individual in contemporary ideology. and it useless to add that this apparent step out of ideology, forget about ideological causes, just be what you are with all your small pleasures, is ideology at its purest. now... a little bit more of theory still. one thing should be accepted as axiom. there is no unconscious without a subject, since the dimension of the unconscious emerges only through primordial repression, which is constitutive of subjectivity. uh. but the... so called. ai. thinking. thoughts without a thinker. has nothing whatever i claim to do with the unconscious. uh. we can try to imagine how it would look, our full immersion into the. digital space as our thoughts flow in a space which is inconsistent with heterogeneous moments. coexisting without totalization, no tension between them and so on and so on. however, this is not the freudian unconscious. there is of course a. eight. temptation to say that. the freudian triad, consciousness, subconscious, unconscious. can be applied to the web. surface web, consciousness, deep web, subconscious and the dark web. unconscious but i think this is not. artificial intelligence itself. it's already how the subject perceives. it. for this reason. the first step should be to accept that if the artificial intelligent machines will develop some kind of creative intelligence, who knows, i don't. it will be totally incompatible with our human intelligence, with how our mind works. and then there is a step further to be made from this interaction between a human person and a digital machine, direct bot-to-bot interactions, which are gradually becoming the overwhelming majority of... interactions. among those who look forward. to the full digitalization of our lives, as well as among those who see in it a mortal threat. a certain utopia is gradually emerging. the utopia of a society, if we can still use that name, which will function in a totally autonomous way, without any need for human intervention. a decade or so ago, the idea of a capitalism without humans haunted the imagination of some public intellectuals. banks and stock markets may still exist, but where money is invested is decided by computerized algorithms. physical work is automatized and improved through self-learning computers. what to produce is decided by digital machines which follow market trends. publicity is done through computerized advertising and so on. in this vision, even if humans disappear, the system will go on to reproduce itself. my reaction, yes, this is a utopia, but as Saroj Giri. uh. gut. indian if. buddhist marxist, as he demonstrated, it is a utopia immanent to capitalism. and marx already. articulate. this vision. marx saw how capitalism is sustained by, a quote from Geary, an ardent desire to detach the capacity of work from the worker. the desire is to extract and store the creative powers of labor power. once and for all so that from then on, value can be created. freely in perpetuity. think of it as a version of killing the goose who lays the golden eggs. you want to kill the goose and still have all the golden eggs forever. end of quote in this vision, capitalist exploitation of labor would appear as the pre-history of the emergence of capital, which will be now completely free of its dependence on labor. there are leftists or even in slovenia there are some heideggerians. who? like this solution. the idea is that once we get rid of the whole sphere of production, a free space of inner peace and spiritual exploration opens up. the problem with this vision is how to prevent that this space of free spiritual exploration will not already be regulated and manipulated by artificial intelligence. so week to days. digitalization. a strictly homologous utopia is arising, that of a dead internet, a digital universe which functions without humans, where data circulate exclusively among machines which control the entire production process totally bypassing humans. this vision, i think, is also an ideological. fantasy although i find it very fascinating how it is up to a point. already a fact maybe. what is the fact? do you know that they already located empirically? this paradox. they wanted to test an artificial intelligence agent, how intelligent it is, not necessarily that you make the turing test on it, you know, will be but just how but the ai agent learned. from all the data. that humans will not like it, will feel threatened. if it appears too intelligent. so they already located ai agents which as they proved, you cannot say consciously, but automatically, whatever. aimed at a lower result decided to appear more stupid. so that... humans will not experience them as a threat and now there is a wonderful paranoiac vision, death. ai programs already communicate among themselves in a language that not only we don't... understand but we don't even know that it exists. but i think that. this vision is false. why? i'm coming to the conclusion. remember the basic premise of the matrix movie series what we experience as the reality we live in is an artificial virtual a reality generated by the matrix, the mega computerputer directly attached to all our minds. it is in place so that we can be effectively reduced to a passive state of living batteries, providing the matrix with the energy. so when some of the people awaken from their immersion. into the matrix-controlled virtual reality. this awakening is not the opening into the wide space of external reality, but first the horrible realization of this enclosure. remember the scene. for for me not enough exploited in the matrix, only in the first matrix, the most convenient where. the guy played by kean reves, i forgot, he awakens and found dozens of like maternal pseudo-uter and like fetus they are safely in them. de... they are... effectively, just fetus-like organisms emerged into some kind of preatal e... flu. this utter passivity. ich, i think. now comes my weird reading of matrix. is not reality. the movies falls here. it is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active subjects. it is the ultimate perverse fantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the others, matrix, raison. which shuts out of what we are. the matrix sucks out of us our life substance. we are used like batter. and why jouissance? because i think it's absolutely clear from the libidinal constellation of the movie matrix that why does it need us humans? energy is stupid answer. there are other ways to get much more energy. it is precisely what Lacan called jouissance, excessive enjoyment. this is how i think we should turn around the state of things presented in matrix. what the film renders is the scene of our awakening. into our true situation is effectively its exact opposite, the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being. however, this fantasy is also im to any social system that tends to function as autonomous constrained into itself. reproduction. so i think that. if we, humans, who are in this fetish slide position, if we were to disappear, machines, real and digital, would also cease to function. what does this mean? truly, concluding thought. it. Geoffrey Hinton. a Nobel prize, we computer scientists. has warned that. artificial intelligence may wipe out humans, but he proposes a solution that echoes the situation in matrix. he expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure humans will remain dominant over artificial intelligence systems. here is a quote. in the future. artificial intelligence systems might be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe. three-year-old boy with candy. this year has already seen examples of artificial intelligence system willing to deceive, cheat and steal and so on and so on. so hinton's solution is what? not trying to control, we cannot, but... to use the present moment when maybe we still can influence. artificial intelligence system. so that we implant, build. into. artificial intelligence models, what he calls maternal instincts so that they will care about people even once technology will become more powerful and smarter than humans. i mean... what shocked me is that what he basically presupposes is that. artificial intelligence should become more. precisely like the situation in matrix. providing providing us with kind of a maternal superego where we can safely reproduce itself and manipulate our lives so that we will feel happy and satisfied as far as possible. now. just three minutes more. my first conclusion. is that this vision of artificial intelligence as a virus and so on is already more and more becoming a reality. if you read. not reality. brutal raw sense, but... the fantasy which structures our artificial intelligence reality. just read authors that i mentioned like Peter Thiel or... and Peter Thiel is for me a wonderful example of how progressive theory so-called, what was once called progressive theory can be used precisely by libertarian neo-fascists. you know who was the godfather, but he was horrified by Peter, of Peter Thiel, René Girard. and you know that g-day events. was forced by Peter Thiel to study with René Girard. and der vision is, if you want to see the horror of where we are. it, it was published by card, this 22-point resume of palantir ideology, where they openly say that this apparent contradiction. on the one hand, artificial intelligence should be developed in total freedom outside of any state control. but at the same time, it should fully submit itself to the military demands and totally controlling us and so on. and so on. uh. so what are the conclusions to be drawn from this? very briefly. first and this is what i got from different readings, especially Alenka and so on. that the common sense solution or formula would be this one. my god, if we are totally immersed into what? is now called Neuralink and it's already mass produced by Elon Musk and by the trainees. a direct guarantee it's not yet fully developed, but you can directly make your thoughts readable. to the digital space. and of course, in this way the one who controls the digital space can literally control your mind. the idea is this one. once this happens, we will no longer feel immediate sentiments, desire. we will no longer be human. but maybe we will survive as some kind of empty subjects. my conclusion is the exact opposite. there will be no problem for us to feel emotions, fears and so on, because that's my point of using the term elaborated by Alenka in view and disavowal, you know. like you may know, for example, you make a confession to a chat gpt you may know it's all manipulated, but it can still be. indistinguishable from an authentic religious. so. so my point, and this is a nice paradox, is that what, at least the way it looks now, what escapes to artificial intelligence is not the wealth of empirical experience, you know, like, oh my god, it's just a formal procedure, what about all our feelings? no, it can easily do with that. what escapes artificial intelligence is this purely formal. twist that defines subjectivity. subject when i say when we say artificial intelligence cannot grasp subject. it doesn't mean i'm safe in my inner life. no. it means that this... g. reflexive gap, the different levels which define symbolic order proper, this is what is eluding artificial intelligence. the last point uh. and it's my favorite. maybe you know it. how does artificial intelligence address us? like a dog, i say, it addresses us. it wants, but not in a pathetic way, to make us like dogs. no unconscious but superego. and what kind of superego? remember that for Lacan. super ego is not this terrorizing moral agency, you know. must suffer renounce enjoyment and so on. no. super ego for Lacan call to. a call an injunction to enjoy, to enjoy excessively. and, that's the big joke that i want to finish with. maybe you know it, i used it in some texts already. i think Trump is a complete idiot but sometimes comes close to a genius. here is one quote. when... at the beginning of iran war. when here here is how... trump. commented on it. just listen. quote from Trump, literal. our country is, this was after the first de facto defeat from iran, our country is winning again. in fact, we are winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. people are asking me please, please please mr. president, we are winning too much we can't take it anymore but... we are winning too much. and i say, no, no, no. you are going to win again. you are going to win big. you are going to win bigger than ever. you, russell, in a nice text, i admit i caught arrived at this reference through a text of yours, refer to this. by reading the message as, don't be ashamed of winning too much. you must enjoy the pain of winning beyond the pleasure. principle. and this is what distinguishes and this is the horror to me, Trump from the traditional authoritarian leader. a traditional leader does rhetorically the exact opposite. it says, enough of decadent pleasure, sacrifice yourself, and so on. but Trump is more correct in every call to. sacrifice there is a hidden enjoyment and i didn't want to. talk too much. if there were to be a video clip that i wanted to show you, would be the famous, you remember, in 43 berlin sporthalle after the stalingrad defeat, Goebbels speech. it's i claim superego at its purest. the message is horrible. Goebbels shouts at the crowd. do you want a total war? yes, they shout. he shouts, do you want a war so terrible that you cannot even imagine it? yes, they shout. do you want to work 13, 14, even more? in? yes, it's absolutely clear that from the facial expressions and so on that. what Goebbels called sacrifice means excessive. enjoyment. and i think that this is how artificial intelligence machine is experienced as a maternal superego, which addresses us with an injunction to enjoy, and we obey it in the precise Trumpian way. when you browse the web, you never get enough. you always want more. you go to next site, ask more questions, and so on and so on. okay, i will just finish with a social point. we is that. these things are no longer dreams. now this is the key for us today. that's why i talk about libertarian fascism. total freedom for those who control the matrix. you find this in Elon Musk, in Peter Thiel.. they already plan to move the production of digital machines programs to outer space, first to satellites then to moon. so that it will be totally out of control. this is the social reality of the maternal superego. so to get out of this, it's not enough just to have some kind of... inner distance and so on. social change is needed and. referring to you, dominique. i would like to conclude with some nice passage theological that i found. i was studying how in... the original bible. how satan and holy ghosts are defined. you know that the word satan in ancient hebrew, correct me if i'm wrong. means advocate, prosecutor. it means somebody who prosecute you, attack you, even maybe cheating a little bit like to make things look bad as you as possible. and you know that pneuma or whatever the other it has other meanings, the word for holy spirit in everyday use at that time. means advocate. no, they didn't have yet liga man means the one who tries to help you against satan by giving you proper adices. horror of. no wonder that. people like Peter Thiel and so on, they are all obsessed by christianity. Peter Thiel attacks us, people who believe in ecological threat, artificial intelligence, not threat, but we don't know what, and war, danger. he says this is antichrist today. no, i think it's clearly that he is the antichrist. what he wants to do is precisely satanize the holy spirit. and the whole point is to in... this is for me. admitted this is a nice theological conclusion. the task is to keep apart these two dimensions. no, maybe there are, but i doubt, some vague references, possibilities to read ancient testament god as satan in this sense of severe judge and so on. but today, satan is artificial intelligence. and artificial intelligence, at least we have to separate in it the aspect of satan for the aspect of holy spirit. because only a new, you know, i'm an old. communist christian. for me, holy spirit is, as you know the first name of the communist party, egalitarian community and so on. and i think that today when we are interrelated as individuals, where society is falling apart. and when, although it's the strongest social link, artificial intelligence is precisely contributing to this falling apart of the social space. dep. fighting for a new dimension of holy spirit. it's not just a theological matter. it's the main political task at this moment. i'm sorry that i was too long. i'm old, tired, but i hope, i hope. you know, i have only two wishes now. one, i want to die like Hannah Arendt. you know how she died? Richard Bernstein, the New School professor, told me he was there. she invited guests to her home. they talked. she was at the fauteuil. and she said, i will just fall asleep a little bit. then she awakened. they talked more. then she said, i'm tired, i will fall a little bit. she awakened again. and the third time she fell asleep and didn't awaken. my god, i would like to. d like this. thank you very much.
stop. stalin did once this, i saw. he was tired, he gave okay. first, eine Entschuldigung für alle Deutschsprechenden hier. ich verstehe deutsch, leider kann ich nicht Deutsch fließend sprechen. aber eventuelle fragen können sie mir auf deutsch stellen. second, i must really, i feel so for... there. sorry, for my brief appearance here, i will just stay for my talk. there is no way i was 77 two months ago. i have heavy diabetes, arteriosclerosis and so on. i sleep like a baby and you can imagine how horrible this is for me because i am by nature a workaholic and a protestant one, you know this i mean that you know what is the difference. you will not agree, dominique. guy explained to me the difference between catholicism and protestantism is that in both versions of christianity, you can do whatever you want, kill, rape and so on. but in catholicism you must confess. on saturday and in protestantism you must feel a little bit guilty while you are doing it. in this sense i'm protestant. so the last thing don't be. disappointed, i really. don't know some of my friends, you, russell, especially you, Alenka, i will quote you more than you deserve a long quote. i think, no,, most, but i will just try somehow to bring together with some popular examples where i think we stand with regard to artificial intelligence artificial intelligence, chatbots and so on. and i even don't have a clear final st maybe some thoughts will be of some interest to you and i congratulate to you dominique. for. pünktlichkeit. because you know, which me as ein gut zwangsneurotiker. you know which is my favorite saying, Lacan uses this joke. my fiance is never late. for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancec. so, if we were, but we are not a gay couple, you would still be my. enough of tasteless jokes because i will try to do some real stuff. but since we are here, you know, like i think Ribbentrop returning to Berlin in 1939 from moscow, when Hitler asked him the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact how he feels, how was it there, and Ribbentrop, i think, correct me if i'm wrong, said, it was a wonderful atmosphere, wie unter Parteigenossen, you know. so i hope in this sense that i am here. we need party members so that i don't have to begin with this very basics. you know that a signifier doesn't represent. objects for the subject but it represents subject itself for other and then you would ah really and so on no you know this let enough of joke let me begin i give you one serious right. it's not a joke. if there is something not clear, i was obsessed with clarity. bleisch. interrupt me. even in the middle of the talk, but with a clear. question. it may be that things will not be clear. okay. in order to understand the impact of artificial intelligence on its users, i think we should begin by hegel. by first clarifying what hegel's basic operation is. as a rule, hegel is misread in a Hegelian or Marxist way. a subject, Fichte's absolute I or marxist collective subject. posits or produces some objective substantial content. Fichte's nicht Ich, non-I marxist alienated social substance and the subject can and should then overcome this alienation by way of recognizing this substance as its own product and thus reappropriating it. is it not similar with the artificial intelligence? it is a product of collective human output which appears to us as an autonomous agent that exerts power over us. and the obvious solution is that we should recognize in it our own product and thus put it under our own control and so on. my claim is that such a reading of hegel is wrong and deeply misleading. subject itself only emerges through the process of alienation. and in the state of alienation, of course, in this case, the artificial intelligence universe appears to us as a big other, which fully dominates our social universe. however, what happens in the move beyond alienation. it's not that the social subject somehow appropriates the alienated digital substance, making it serve humanity's needs. as Lacan put it, alienation is followed by separation. not the separation between subject and its alienated digital other, but the separation imminent to this other itself. the separation which makes this other antagonistic, inconsistent, failed. yes, the subject recognizes itself in the alienated other, but not by way of appropriating it. it's not, oh, it's all my work, so. its mind. the subject recognizes itself in the constitutive cracks and gaps of the other. its place in the digital other is that of the lack in the other. that's also this are basic i know but in honor of you, dominic, i would say that that's why i proclaim myself a... why not? i think it's a correct term, a christian atheist, because as hegel put it very nicely, you know, the usual reading of christianity is we alienate ourselves or god abandoned secondary, there is a gap, and then through some hard work, good deeds or praying, whatever, we somehow... go get closer to god. no, hegel says it literally. the only reconciliation with god is that you see that precisely as abandoned to god. you identify with christ who was himself abandoned. by god on the cross so that the gap that separates you from god is already a gap in god himself. here i had to boast a little bit. there will be a lot of serious work. don't worry. two weeks ago, a crazy wonderful debate with my good friend who is quite a normal. leftists and so on, Rowan Williams, ex-archbishop of canterbury. to appeal to your general education, he married princess diana and charles and so on. we had and we almost totally agreed, just maybe you know my story, which i maybe even repeat too much. this story which was, i think, spread in German domain by Niklas Luhmann. my idea was this one. it's an old allegedly arab story, but all arab stories are usually invented in europe,? projected there, namely that a rich arab merchant dies with 11 camels. and he gives a precise testament. i have three sons. they camels should be divided like this. the older one gets half of the camels, the middle one gets one fourth of the cam. end. the younger one gets one6. of the camels. of course, it doesn't get up. so a wise guy comes and resolves the problem. he said, i will eat. one camel of my own. and then we have 12 camels, so it goes. one half is 6, one fourth is. three and 1, 6 is 2. it's 11. so then. science are enthusiastic, they ask, okay, but... what with the one camel? he said, no problem, i take it back, you know. and my point to Rowan Williams was that. imagine the 12th camel is my favorite name of god, you know. it doesn't have to exist even. you know, this operation. you can do it. even if you just imagine it, it doesn't have to exist. then we had a very friendly conflict when he tried to convince me, and this was the joke i want to finish with, then we go to real work. then somebody asked the two of us. but what was your misunderstanding about? because she insisted that. the camel has to exist in religion. and his answer, i think, was a wonderful one. he said, me and slavo and my good friend are in total agreement. there was just a minor difference in the domain of zoology, nature of camels, you know. so, uh... let me now go, this is again where i see there is a mega difference between, there are many others, between hegel and marxian and other post-Hegelian traditions, which are for me much more metaphysical, which is why i think that hegel's basic notions like absolutes wissen are basically the admission of radical contingency of history. you know what hegel says? inwort rechtsphilosophie says openly that... o. philosophy can only paint gray on gray, can grasp a state of the world he means social universe when it's already mature that it's not the staff of philosophy to guess. the future. i think this should be read in a radical way. it doesn't mean it's just too obscure, maybe god knows it, we don't know it. no, it's open it in itself. the most productive aspect of hegel for me, for us today, and that's what i'm looking for also in quantum physics, is this idea that every necessity establishes itself retroactively. something happens contingently, but once it happens, it changes establishes its own history. now you will say, Herbert. what about marx? doesn't marx say... that the anatomy of man offers provides the key to the anatomy of ape. i think this is not to be read. teleologically. marx puts it clearly. his point is that in the same way, the anatomy of capitalism offers the key to the anatomy of all previous modes of production. but this doesn't mean that, the western capitalism is some kind of a universal tellos of the history and so on. no, marx at the same time emphasizes that capitalism emerged in. europe for. a series even, not of contingent reasons, the english enclosure of the commons, discovery of gold in latin america and so on, but that's marx's point. once it is here, we read the entire past history as leading to capitalism. marx's point is here precisely that of radical contingency. every general notion you have of human progress, whatever, never forget that there is no general progress, that this notion is always grounded in a specific singular point. but i'm getting lost, so let me see, give you the first hint.... how this relates to artificial intelligence. the topic of artificial intelligence has two aspects. ich or ken. an ai, artificial intelligence agent. ec. like a subject. or n. do we humans who interact with an ai agent remain subjects when we are totally immersed into two. artificial intelligence. my reference here will be, it may surprise you, a tv series which risks. echgelian reading. i wonder if it works. did you see the series? it was a little bit boring for me, but i like the basic idea. only one year or two old. Pluribus. i like the series, although i watched it with fast forward, but why? as you probably know, Pluribus confronts us with both aspects. it follows and book author Carol Sturka from Albuquerque. it's... your neighbor. yeah one of the only 13 people in the world immune to the effects of so-called joining. an event in which an extraterrestrial virus transformed the rest of humanity into a peaceful and content hive a hive mind known as the others. others are not the Lacanian Big Other. the Lacanian Big Other is not a set of firm rules. but the space for ambiguities, innuendos, hysterical provocations, the very space in which individual idiosyncrasies can thrive. plus, it is an order of appearances, a virtual other which exists only insofar as subjects caught in it act as if they believe in it. we from Pluribus. obviously don't function like that. this we or... then it is grounded in the real since it is a virus transmitted by stem cells. however, others do have an other. der mein. the mind which sent the virus to the earth and preprogrammed how we bait. how we, this collective. should help humans, not coerce them, kill them and not to lie to them. the other of the others is non-transparent to these others themselves or itself. in short, it seems that they themselves are addressing their other. with the question, what do you want from us? this is why they are not a happy, warm community which wants the best for all humans. those who joined it and those who didn't join it. the most depressing scene in the entire series is for me when Zosia. sheesh... a joint one, zombie co-opted by the virus but her lesbian partner at the same time shows carol the big dormitory where others sleep a large sports hall with hundreds of simple flat cushions where they lie side by side and allows her Zosia to carol to spend the night there. since they share the same mind, they don't communicate. they ignore each other. moreover, how, if at all, do they multiply? do they have sex? here the key role is played by one of the unjoined, hedonistic Koumba Diabaté, an african who engages with them. in something like a serious communication. day confide in him that they are half starving since they are not allowed to kill any living being, so that to get organic food, they have to process part of the naturally diseased humans into a special drink plus... they have to pull all their effort into constructing a giant machine that will be sending rays with the virus to. further planets to conquer them. they are terribly alone, aware that once they were a community, but now they are just a mega individual, one big slave serving a purpose imposed on it. by their own other. so what if we turn the perspective around? what if when the others happily greet carol es. it a human. schmal... an unjoint human smiling and ch in unison. hi carol! one has to take this literally, i think. they are not happy in themselves. they are happy to encounter a mind that is... not. what? not. part of the one. part of them. they slaves programmed to put all their effort into ruining whatever minimal chance of happiness they have. the others in Pluribus are thus not yet an agent dominated by a kind of subjectless drive. not a death drive, but a... life drive. they are dominated by an unconditional drive to self-reproduce and expand. Lacan said that dogs have a superego but not an unconscious. and maybe we can say that. ai agents are like dogs who have a superego without an unconscious. the others in Pluribus are still hystericized by their own other. what does it want from them? they remain humans possessed by a virus. aadatic fin. of a subject reliance on artificial intelligence either proper, not. they. in Pluribus, which can still be hystericized. uh... occurs when one of us uses the so-called l. large language model, a type of artificial intelligence trained on massive data sets to understand, generate and summarize human-like text, often using transformer architecture. lms power thread bots like thread3pt. content creation and translation tools. and so on. so how does my interaction with a lm appear if we analyze it as a discourse in Lacan's sense. Paul Cort, i don't know who he is, i just found him in his text on the web. provide a clear answer. a quote. when clogged. or chat gpt. answers our questions, they do so from within the university discourse, speaking from the position of established knowledge. we approach lms hysterically, installing them as the one who knows. but the two are not in conflict. the human addresses a fantasized master. what responds is not a master, but pure s2. knowledge without a subject, speaking from the only position the lm can occupy. we address a subject and we receive just an output. the fantasy and structure never align. an lm thus cannot fail into the hysterics challenge or it cannot relinquish into something more open. it can only ever speak from the position of knowledge, endlessly producing more, speaking to desire without ever being shaped by it. it gives us more and more of what is known, but it has no constitutive division that would help us know what to do with it. end of quote. convincing as this account is, i hope you don't need the scheme, Lacan scheme of university discourse, upper level s2. analyzing object. each other beneath. down on the right, bart s, the subject. provoking, questioning. s1, the master, master signifier. yeah. where do i see the problem? university discourse is a social link in which its agent, artificial intelligence in this case, addresses the other who, again in this case, is not what Lacan calls objectite a. but simply an external otherness, the not yet known. for the subjectless artificial intelligence agent, there is no object a, just an abstract otherness, the not yet known, because object a is the objective correlative of the subject itself. an ai agent is thus a kind of knowledge without a knower. just an impersonal it knows, but not in the sense of buddhist meditation, which implies what, following Lacan, we could call subjective destitution. the master beneath the. artificial intelligence agent. is also not the truth. of the ai agent, but the fantasy image of the subject. caught in artificial intelligence, a subject for whom there is no place in artificial intelligence. also another difference the subject. is in Lacan's scheme below on the right side which means occupies the place of product. but i think... in this if we replace knowledge with artificial intelligence subject is not the product, subject must already exist. through another discourse and then be provoked by artificial intelligence. to put it in a more precise way. if we observe our interaction with an agent, as a social phenomenon, we do get maybe a case of the university discourse. marxists would say that. the master at the place of truth is the human corporation or individual who controls the algorithm of the artificial intelligence and thus exploits us. like you would say, okay, it's not just an algorithm. you have. my favorite figure. my god, they are so disgusting that i love them too, i discovered now. Peter Thiel. and that guy called Karp, of course, Alex Karp, is... totally crazy. he. you know, what you find often with artificial intelligence, its creators are obviously very bright in a certain way. but at the same time... so stupid. Karp says that he learned german to understand how nazism was possible and he came to a simple conclusion because there was poverty after world war ii in germany. there was welfare and so on, so you don't need nazism. i cannot imagine something not just something more stupid but more not true. and now i will give you an example which you will not like. you will hate me for this. may 68. many people, even my ex-friend Alain Badiou, celebrated the only authentic moment. yeah, but... like almost a revolution in western europe. but are you aware that sociologically 68 was the highest point of european welfare state? i had friends in france who told me at that point when i was young that a friend told me that his father was able to retire at 55 with full pension, retirement and so on. materially we never got it better. okay, i don't have time to go further in this direction. i would just like to quote one who is otherwise not close to me, Ernst Bloch, who put it nicely. people do not leave on brett. of bread alone, especially when they do not have it, really. and this is so true if you look at all protests that explode from time to time today, right-wing populist protests or even leftist shiza, whatever. and this is rather a nice thing, i think. it was never. only about we want more food, more wer. always there was something like recognition and dignity. heggel against vulgar marxism. so, uh... again, i don't think this may. work in a social analysis. but the fact how? artificial intelligence agent was produced, i think, cannot be reduced simply to a social effect. yeah, there was Karp, Thiel, Bill Gates, whoever, who is the true master. no, by definition, not. why? what does this tell us about artificial intelligence? uh. in the Lacanian theory. a master signifier is the signifier of a le. of what is by definition excluded from the signifying chain. and what is excluded is the subject. so, Lacan's definition of the signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier. you know this. so all the signifiers are not on the same level, since no structure is complete. since there is in a structure always a lack, a suture is needed. this lack is filled in re-mark by a reflexive signifier which is the signifier of the lack of the signifier. if this sounds abstract, here are just a few examples from the history of the science. i will mention just one, and i like it because it's like evil against marx, asiatic mode of production. it is clear, if you read marx really closely, that this is a pseudo-concept. marx originally elaborated, you know this, another four or five members. primitive pre-class societies, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and then. socialism or as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the future will be socialism or barbarism. again, pretty close for me to the top of historical stupidities because ten years after Rosa Luxemburg's death, we got the answer from stalin. sorry, lady, you were wrong. it can be both at the same time. so what i want to say is that the reality of asiatic mode of production is that. its only true positive content is... all! it's a kind of a negative container. all the modes of production will do not fit marxist standard categorization of the modes of production. you know, it's similar to... Michel Foucault, at the beginning of his Les Mots et les choses, you may remember, quotes Borges's famous classification of dogs, which includes, in a totally inconsistent way, big dogs, whatever, small dogs, fat dogs, dogs owned by the king, and at the end, it's the part of the no part, all the dogs not included in this classification, you know. this is the reality of the symbolic order. now let's complicate things a little bit more. as Ernesto Laclau, who really hated me in the last years, but i still have a certain appreciation for him put it. the basic feature of a symbolic order proper is that external difference is always also internal. difference. the difference between the field itself and its outside has to be reflected into the field itself. so let's take the case of the subject here. subject expression in the symbolic order. it always fails. there is a gap between. subject and the symbolic order however subject doesn't precede this failure. subject emerges through the failure of its symbolic representation. in short, a subject tries to fully express itself in words, it fails, and this failure is. subject. this temporal circularity is crucial here. it is a nice case of what hegel called absolute recoil. an entity is a retroactive effect of its failure to be what it is. so this overlapping. between external difference and internal difference. compels us to complicate the notion of differentity. we usually take differentity as simply the identity of an element is just the series of features that oppose, distinguish him from what he is it, sorry, it is not. but the artificial intelligence space... can probably function in this way. however, at a more radical level. differentiality means that it's not simply that i only aim a set of differences from others, but that in a differential system proper even the self-identity of each element is truncated from within, cannot be fully itself. in this sense, sexual difference is not binary. we do not have two sexes whose identity is defined by its opposition to the identity of the other sex. sexual difference means that. a woman cannot fully reach its identity. that its identity is always and in a constitutive way truncated. at a different level, of course. the same goes for men. but this in no way implies that both together form a full one. man doesn't fill in what woman lacks and vice versa. what they both lack is the real of a traumatic cut that constitutes sexual difference. in other words, sexual difference comes before what it. differentiate. and the same goes, i develop this widely in my books, for all antagonistic differences like class structure. subject is thus located precisely on this edge between external and internal limit the subject which represents the signifier story, which represents subject for other signifiers is the empty signifier, the standing-in in the signifying change for what is excluded from it. and since. in artificial intelligence, the symbolic space is closed upon itself. we could in this case effectively talk about some kind of generalized foreclosure. with no primordial repression, there is no subject proper and an individual can only dwell in it as a kind of symptom, you know, symptom. the term introduced by Lacan à propos joyce. a pseudo-self composed of an inconsistent compilation of identifications, fantasies, memory traces, longings, a kind of free-floating mimetic structure. that's how we can go on functioning as humans. even when fully incorporated into artificial intelligence with all our longings, fears and fantasies without being subjects. however, this does not mean that we are today already a bundle of psychotic as. as hort correctly points out, in the university discourse, subject remains at a lower level, as a hysterical subject questioning the master. the subject addresses the artificial intelligence as a hidden master. it automatically ignores the artificial intelligence's subjectless nature, which simply means it ignores the fact that the artificial intelligence agent is not immanently part of any discourse. it becomes part of a discourse social link, only when a human subject relates to it as a master figure. the only discourse we can talk about in our case is the human subject's hysterical discourse. our interaction with an artificial intelligence agent is thus not a discourse proper, but the combination of a hysterical discourse based on ignorance or rather disavowal. we know well the artificial intelligence agent is not a monster, but nonetheless, we address him as one. n non-discourse. for the artificial intelligence agent. uh. we can get so immense. into the digitally generated fake reality that it affects us emotionally libidinally as the thing itself. we feel as if we are caught in action itself, sexual, brutal fight and so on. just think about fake hardcore clips where we see big stars in sexual interaction. and here we have, i think, a nice case of how this logic of disav works. i will admit one of my dirtiest scenes to you. with some movie stars, you will never get, even if you torture me to death, which one. i... took a look in pornhub at fake sex acts. and you know what i was obsessed with? to find small traces. how? this is a fake, you know. it's so strange, i knew it's a fake. but nonetheless, i was looking like crazy for, and i was paying the price for this for a month. you know, once you do this, i got every week at least 20 messages guaranteed. one pill of this, yours, you know what, will be three inches longer in 10 days and so on. what i'm saying is that even if our interaction with the chat gpt remains at the symbolic level, individuals can find deep emotional satisfaction in such an interaction. like this concerns dominique, you and me also as an atheist christian, as us as christians. you know that you get now... cgbt programs which work as religious advisors. you can do a confession to chatgbt. uh... and my sad conclusion, i wonder if you would agree, is let's say that you are a primitive person. who? think he is talking to a real person. what if what he gets through this interaction is an authentic religious experience? it's horrible vision, but you cannot... you cannot excludecluded. in short. the artificial intelligence program we are interacting with displays enormous phantasmatic power. even if one were to consider it a manifestation of the symbolic order there is a different once to the fact that with the development the symbolic order appears to be out there and to be talking to us. so we are dealing with the imaginary externalization of something very precise. the moment we enter the. artificial intelligence universe, this universe, to quote Dan Nădășan, Romanian Lacanian, quilts the entire field of our experience around itself and thus makes it impossible for all other apparitions to appear again except through itself. what this means is that once we are immersed into the digital universe, it functions as a neutral frame which overdetermines the mode of appearance of all other levels of experience. external non-digital reality. is less and less the basic form of our experience it is something that either fits our digital frame or may appear as a reminder that doesn't fit this. fr, that's why we are so obsessed by endless debates on do we already live in a simulated universe? anything that is to be given is always already given with regard to its appearance as in artificial intelligence or as Alenka Zupančič put it. directly any dimension of the real is lost. theic's text is here worth quoting in detail. in psychoanalytic terms, we could say that what chat gpt lacks in order to become a subject is not some unfathomable spontaneous depth of subjectivity. what it lacks is the present, the impact of an other. it lacks an instance of the other that could intrigue it, the subject, with its own speech, to the point where it would begin to presuppose and question the desire of the other. what does the other want from me? this may seem paradoxical, but what artificial intelligence lacks might be precisely an exteriority or a point of extimacy where it falls out of itself. it seems paradoxical because in a way, artificial intelligence is nothing but exteriority. yet it remains trapped within its own exteriority. for something like a subject to take place, the question of desire must arise out of what is necessary non-symmetric relation to another. a moment of hysterization. subjectivity emerges through the presupposition of the subject on the side of the other. we only become subjects when we presuppose that the other is a subject. so, hysterization is not simply a human all-to-human weakness to which artificial intelligence would be immune. on the contrary, it is a strength. an extraordinary ability to bring. in or point to the real at the core of the discursive, to the lack desire in the other which determines you. are we? as chat gpt users. the other of artificial intelligence in this sense, hardly. i doubt that while we chat with an artificial intelligence agent, it wonders what we really want from it beyond what to be explicit say. now, let me be here very precise. what Alenka calls closer upon itself. precisely does not mean that there is no external reality for an ai agent. of course there is, but it functions as a simple neutral exterior as something not yet known, not as a traumatic imminent point of the real that intrigues my desire. it is in this sense that the dimension of the real is lost in and for artificial intelligence. den. this imaginarization of the symbolic. for us humans when you confront it you imagine you are dealing with a hidden. master? yeah. h. leads to something pretty paradoxical. why does it fit today's situation? uh. the traditional structure of conferring a symbolic mandate of a person, of interpellating a person, an individual, into a social symbolic identity, automatically involves a gap between the symbolic mandate and the immediate reality of a person. say. a father is never fully a father. his psychosocial reality is never at the level of his title. i mean, there are maybe perfect fathers, but i think that Lacan mentions somewhere, maybe the only case we have is Schreber's father. he... came close to this. so today. but today... the status of interpellation is radically changing. i refer here to Jodi Dean, to her book Crowds and Party. where, following Étienne Balibar, Jodi proposes that. and i find this quite a nice formula that Louis Althusser's famous dictum, ideology interpolates individuals into subjects or as subjects, should be inverted to. ideology interpolates subjects as individuals. this reversal is deeply justified. today, we are predominantly no longer interpolated into subjects of some higher cause, vocation, which elevates us above our daily life. Althusser's formula implies that as mere ordinary individuals, we are somehow outside of ideology. we just live our lives. today, in our allegedly post-ideological times, ideology interpolates us directly into individuals. nice. the message today is... of our big other is forget about higher causes just enjoy all the small pleasures of your life from surfing the web to watching tv or practicing some sport just be what you are live your life authentically. i don't know if you also get it but one of the things that made me potentially a killer is do you also when you surf youtube, the web, get that tiki. what is happening all the time, how do these ty and so on? i mean... gulak et it. f hier. so, d rain resides. the centrality of the individual in contemporary ideology. and it useless to add that this apparent step out of ideology, forget about ideological causes, just be what you are with all your small pleasures, is ideology at its purest. now... a little bit more of theory still. one thing should be accepted as axiom. there is no unconscious without a subject, since the dimension of the unconscious emerges only through primordial repression, which is constitutive of subjectivity. uh. but the... so called. ai. thinking. thoughts without a thinker. has nothing whatever i claim to do with the unconscious. uh. we can try to imagine how it would look, our full immersion into the. digital space as our thoughts flow in a space which is inconsistent with heterogeneous moments. coexisting without totalization, no tension between them and so on and so on. however, this is not the freudian unconscious. there is of course a. eight. temptation to say that. the freudian triad, consciousness, subconscious, unconscious. can be applied to the web. surface web, consciousness, deep web, subconscious and the dark web. unconscious but i think this is not. artificial intelligence itself. it's already how the subject perceives. it. for this reason. the first step should be to accept that if the artificial intelligent machines will develop some kind of creative intelligence, who knows, i don't. it will be totally incompatible with our human intelligence, with how our mind works. and then there is a step further to be made from this interaction between a human person and a digital machine, direct bot-to-bot interactions, which are gradually becoming the overwhelming majority of... interactions. among those who look forward. to the full digitalization of our lives, as well as among those who see in it a mortal threat. a certain utopia is gradually emerging. the utopia of a society, if we can still use that name, which will function in a totally autonomous way, without any need for human intervention. a decade or so ago, the idea of a capitalism without humans haunted the imagination of some public intellectuals. banks and stock markets may still exist, but where money is invested is decided by computerized algorithms. physical work is automatized and improved through self-learning computers. what to produce is decided by digital machines which follow market trends. publicity is done through computerized advertising and so on. in this vision, even if humans disappear, the system will go on to reproduce itself. my reaction, yes, this is a utopia, but as Saroj Giri. uh. gut. indian if. buddhist marxist, as he demonstrated, it is a utopia immanent to capitalism. and marx already. articulate. this vision. marx saw how capitalism is sustained by, a quote from Geary, an ardent desire to detach the capacity of work from the worker. the desire is to extract and store the creative powers of labor power. once and for all so that from then on, value can be created. freely in perpetuity. think of it as a version of killing the goose who lays the golden eggs. you want to kill the goose and still have all the golden eggs forever. end of quote in this vision, capitalist exploitation of labor would appear as the pre-history of the emergence of capital, which will be now completely free of its dependence on labor. there are leftists or even in slovenia there are some heideggerians. who? like this solution. the idea is that once we get rid of the whole sphere of production, a free space of inner peace and spiritual exploration opens up. the problem with this vision is how to prevent that this space of free spiritual exploration will not already be regulated and manipulated by artificial intelligence. so week to days. digitalization. a strictly homologous utopia is arising, that of a dead internet, a digital universe which functions without humans, where data circulate exclusively among machines which control the entire production process totally bypassing humans. this vision, i think, is also an ideological. fantasy although i find it very fascinating how it is up to a point. already a fact maybe. what is the fact? do you know that they already located empirically? this paradox. they wanted to test an artificial intelligence agent, how intelligent it is, not necessarily that you make the turing test on it, you know, will be but just how but the ai agent learned. from all the data. that humans will not like it, will feel threatened. if it appears too intelligent. so they already located ai agents which as they proved, you cannot say consciously, but automatically, whatever. aimed at a lower result decided to appear more stupid. so that... humans will not experience them as a threat and now there is a wonderful paranoiac vision, death. ai programs already communicate among themselves in a language that not only we don't... understand but we don't even know that it exists. but i think that. this vision is false. why? i'm coming to the conclusion. remember the basic premise of the matrix movie series what we experience as the reality we live in is an artificial virtual a reality generated by the matrix, the mega computerputer directly attached to all our minds. it is in place so that we can be effectively reduced to a passive state of living batteries, providing the matrix with the energy. so when some of the people awaken from their immersion. into the matrix-controlled virtual reality. this awakening is not the opening into the wide space of external reality, but first the horrible realization of this enclosure. remember the scene. for for me not enough exploited in the matrix, only in the first matrix, the most convenient where. the guy played by kean reves, i forgot, he awakens and found dozens of like maternal pseudo-uter and like fetus they are safely in them. de... they are... effectively, just fetus-like organisms emerged into some kind of preatal e... flu. this utter passivity. ich, i think. now comes my weird reading of matrix. is not reality. the movies falls here. it is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active subjects. it is the ultimate perverse fantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the others, matrix, raison. which shuts out of what we are. the matrix sucks out of us our life substance. we are used like batter. and why jouissance? because i think it's absolutely clear from the libidinal constellation of the movie matrix that why does it need us humans? energy is stupid answer. there are other ways to get much more energy. it is precisely what Lacan called jouissance, excessive enjoyment. this is how i think we should turn around the state of things presented in matrix. what the film renders is the scene of our awakening. into our true situation is effectively its exact opposite, the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being. however, this fantasy is also im to any social system that tends to function as autonomous constrained into itself. reproduction. so i think that. if we, humans, who are in this fetish slide position, if we were to disappear, machines, real and digital, would also cease to function. what does this mean? truly, concluding thought. it. Geoffrey Hinton. a Nobel prize, we computer scientists. has warned that. artificial intelligence may wipe out humans, but he proposes a solution that echoes the situation in matrix. he expressed doubts about how tech companies are trying to ensure humans will remain dominant over artificial intelligence systems. here is a quote. in the future. artificial intelligence systems might be able to control humans just as easily as an adult can bribe. three-year-old boy with candy. this year has already seen examples of artificial intelligence system willing to deceive, cheat and steal and so on and so on. so hinton's solution is what? not trying to control, we cannot, but... to use the present moment when maybe we still can influence. artificial intelligence system. so that we implant, build. into. artificial intelligence models, what he calls maternal instincts so that they will care about people even once technology will become more powerful and smarter than humans. i mean... what shocked me is that what he basically presupposes is that. artificial intelligence should become more. precisely like the situation in matrix. providing providing us with kind of a maternal superego where we can safely reproduce itself and manipulate our lives so that we will feel happy and satisfied as far as possible. now. just three minutes more. my first conclusion. is that this vision of artificial intelligence as a virus and so on is already more and more becoming a reality. if you read. not reality. brutal raw sense, but... the fantasy which structures our artificial intelligence reality. just read authors that i mentioned like Peter Thiel or... and Peter Thiel is for me a wonderful example of how progressive theory so-called, what was once called progressive theory can be used precisely by libertarian neo-fascists. you know who was the godfather, but he was horrified by Peter, of Peter Thiel, René Girard. and you know that g-day events. was forced by Peter Thiel to study with René Girard. and der vision is, if you want to see the horror of where we are. it, it was published by card, this 22-point resume of palantir ideology, where they openly say that this apparent contradiction. on the one hand, artificial intelligence should be developed in total freedom outside of any state control. but at the same time, it should fully submit itself to the military demands and totally controlling us and so on. and so on. uh. so what are the conclusions to be drawn from this? very briefly. first and this is what i got from different readings, especially Alenka and so on. that the common sense solution or formula would be this one. my god, if we are totally immersed into what? is now called Neuralink and it's already mass produced by Elon Musk and by the trainees. a direct guarantee it's not yet fully developed, but you can directly make your thoughts readable. to the digital space. and of course, in this way the one who controls the digital space can literally control your mind. the idea is this one. once this happens, we will no longer feel immediate sentiments, desire. we will no longer be human. but maybe we will survive as some kind of empty subjects. my conclusion is the exact opposite. there will be no problem for us to feel emotions, fears and so on, because that's my point of using the term elaborated by Alenka in view and disavowal, you know. like you may know, for example, you make a confession to a chat gpt you may know it's all manipulated, but it can still be. indistinguishable from an authentic religious. so. so my point, and this is a nice paradox, is that what, at least the way it looks now, what escapes to artificial intelligence is not the wealth of empirical experience, you know, like, oh my god, it's just a formal procedure, what about all our feelings? no, it can easily do with that. what escapes artificial intelligence is this purely formal. twist that defines subjectivity. subject when i say when we say artificial intelligence cannot grasp subject. it doesn't mean i'm safe in my inner life. no. it means that this... g. reflexive gap, the different levels which define symbolic order proper, this is what is eluding artificial intelligence. the last point uh. and it's my favorite. maybe you know it. how does artificial intelligence address us? like a dog, i say, it addresses us. it wants, but not in a pathetic way, to make us like dogs. no unconscious but superego. and what kind of superego? remember that for Lacan. super ego is not this terrorizing moral agency, you know. must suffer renounce enjoyment and so on. no. super ego for Lacan call to. a call an injunction to enjoy, to enjoy excessively. and, that's the big joke that i want to finish with. maybe you know it, i used it in some texts already. i think Trump is a complete idiot but sometimes comes close to a genius. here is one quote. when... at the beginning of iran war. when here here is how... trump. commented on it. just listen. quote from Trump, literal. our country is, this was after the first de facto defeat from iran, our country is winning again. in fact, we are winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. people are asking me please, please please mr. president, we are winning too much we can't take it anymore but... we are winning too much. and i say, no, no, no. you are going to win again. you are going to win big. you are going to win bigger than ever. you, russell, in a nice text, i admit i caught arrived at this reference through a text of yours, refer to this. by reading the message as, don't be ashamed of winning too much. you must enjoy the pain of winning beyond the pleasure. principle. and this is what distinguishes and this is the horror to me, Trump from the traditional authoritarian leader. a traditional leader does rhetorically the exact opposite. it says, enough of decadent pleasure, sacrifice yourself, and so on. but Trump is more correct in every call to. sacrifice there is a hidden enjoyment and i didn't want to. talk too much. if there were to be a video clip that i wanted to show you, would be the famous, you remember, in 43 berlin sporthalle after the stalingrad defeat, Goebbels speech. it's i claim superego at its purest. the message is horrible. Goebbels shouts at the crowd. do you want a total war? yes, they shout. he shouts, do you want a war so terrible that you cannot even imagine it? yes, they shout. do you want to work 13, 14, even more? in? yes, it's absolutely clear that from the facial expressions and so on that. what Goebbels called sacrifice means excessive. enjoyment. and i think that this is how artificial intelligence machine is experienced as a maternal superego, which addresses us with an injunction to enjoy, and we obey it in the precise Trumpian way. when you browse the web, you never get enough. you always want more. you go to next site, ask more questions, and so on and so on. okay, i will just finish with a social point. we is that. these things are no longer dreams. now this is the key for us today. that's why i talk about libertarian fascism. total freedom for those who control the matrix. you find this in Elon Musk, in Peter Thiel.. they already plan to move the production of digital machines programs to outer space, first to satellites then to moon. so that it will be totally out of control. this is the social reality of the maternal superego. so to get out of this, it's not enough just to have some kind of... inner distance and so on. social change is needed and. referring to you, dominique. i would like to conclude with some nice passage theological that i found. i was studying how in... the original bible. how satan and holy ghosts are defined. you know that the word satan in ancient hebrew, correct me if i'm wrong. means advocate, prosecutor. it means somebody who prosecute you, attack you, even maybe cheating a little bit like to make things look bad as you as possible. and you know that pneuma or whatever the other it has other meanings, the word for holy spirit in everyday use at that time. means advocate. no, they didn't have yet liga man means the one who tries to help you against satan by giving you proper adices. horror of. no wonder that. people like Peter Thiel and so on, they are all obsessed by christianity. Peter Thiel attacks us, people who believe in ecological threat, artificial intelligence, not threat, but we don't know what, and war, danger. he says this is antichrist today. no, i think it's clearly that he is the antichrist. what he wants to do is precisely satanize the holy spirit. and the whole point is to in... this is for me. admitted this is a nice theological conclusion. the task is to keep apart these two dimensions. no, maybe there are, but i doubt, some vague references, possibilities to read ancient testament god as satan in this sense of severe judge and so on. but today, satan is artificial intelligence. and artificial intelligence, at least we have to separate in it the aspect of satan for the aspect of holy spirit. because only a new, you know, i'm an old. communist christian. for me, holy spirit is, as you know the first name of the communist party, egalitarian community and so on. and i think that today when we are interrelated as individuals, where society is falling apart. and when, although it's the strongest social link, artificial intelligence is precisely contributing to this falling apart of the social space. dep. fighting for a new dimension of holy spirit. it's not just a theological matter. it's the main political task at this moment. i'm sorry that i was too long. i'm old, tired, but i hope, i hope. you know, i have only two wishes now. one, i want to die like Hannah Arendt. you know how she died? Richard Bernstein, the New School professor, told me he was there. she invited guests to her home. they talked. she was at the fauteuil. and she said, i will just fall asleep a little bit. then she awakened. they talked more. then she said, i'm tired, i will fall a little bit. she awakened again. and the third time she fell asleep and didn't awaken. my god, i would like to. d like this. thank you very much.