Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh (2024)
Author: Giorgi Vachnadze
Edition: 1st
Date: October 2024
CatNO: (becoming)07A
ISBN: 978-9925-8118-8-5 (Print)
Language: English
Format: Softcover
Binding: Perfect Bound
Dimensions: 11cm x 18cm
Pages: 185
Umschlag: Bilderdruck Matt 300g/m2
Inhalt: Munken White Vol 1.75 80g/m2
Layouts & Design by Becoming
(Claire Elise,
& Polymnia)
To be cited as:
Vachnadze, G. (2024) Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8118-8-5.
Our Algorithm, who art in AWS servers; lead us not into clickbait, and deliver us from Targeted Ads, for the Platform Economy, the Investment Capital, and the Surplus are yours—now and forever. Amen.
To write in Georgia is to write between two superpowers, the West and Russia; the only way to create space for oneself is to pit these powers against each other. In a way, a writer writing in Georgia is also caught between the hegemonies of Corporate-AI Neoliberalism and Orthodox Christianity. Set in motion by a punk, reactionary impulse, Giorgi Vachnadze pits these two overbearing symbolics against each other; what falls out when two discourses are concatenated against each other: a new signifier? An object a? A mathematical remainder?
On a certain epistemic level, pitting AI against Christianity is a sublimation of pitting Capital against itself, an intensification of Capital that seeks to push it towards collapse; the author has thus built a discourse accelerator. This is a hysterical book, where two negatives are brought together and then fed through a positivistic, double-meat-grinder of Foucault and Wittgenstein, and what remained, so to speak, was almost unreasonably interesting. It is not just one thing that falls out of this dialectic, but dozens; the collision brings to the surface a great deal of interesting subject matter, from the sociology of calculation, to the semiotics of the Flesh, to encratic regimes of self-governance, colonialism and sexuality.
Whether read as a strategic move or a rant, the book is very entertaining in its shifting around from detailed studies of Alan Turing’s philosophical work, to close readings of Biblical scripture—the selection of these two signifiers, AI & Christianity, wasn’t, after all, just an isolated grievance, but a neurotic symptom atop a deeply rooted contradiction playing out within the subjectivity of the author—so while it is, in a way, an auto-psychoanalytical production, it might as well be any of us in the chair, right?
“It’s a hysterical book, in the sense that it is the author’s own psychoanalysis made out of theory. Lacan is going to say that you should hystericize in analysis, analysis must exist in hysteria” — Lucas Ferraço Nassif
This version is identical to the first, but the typography has been updated to the 2025 style. It has been printed using different materials, improving the overall quality of the book.
About the author
Giorgi Vachnadze is a Foucault and Wittgenstein scholar. He completed his Bachelor studies at New Mexico State University and received a Master’s qualification in philosophy at the University of Louvain. Former editor and peer-reviewer for the Graduate Student Journal of philosophy “The Apricot”, he has been published in multiple popular and academic journals world-wide. Vachnadze’s research focuses on philosophy of language and discourse analysis. Some of the questions and themes addressed in his work include: History of Combat Sports, Ancient Stoicism, Genealogies of Truth, Histories of Formal Systems, Genealogy of Science, Ethics in AI and Psychoanalysis, Media Archaeology, Game Studies and more.
Related material
Book discussion with Giorgi Vachnadze, Lucas Ferraço Nassif and Palais Sinclaire