THE CARTESIAN COGITO AS THE SUBJECT OF AI

Four decades ago, Donna Haraway wrote her “Cyborg Manifesto”1, in which she located the emancipatory potential of cyborgs in the very feature most of us perceived as a mortal threat to our being-human: we should leave behind any anti-technological nostalgia for old “authentic” ways of being and joyfully assume that our lives, up to our most intimate feelings, are inextricably intermingled with technology. In a quite literal way, we are more and more functioning like cyborgs, incorporating into our bodies technological components without which we would not survive, and the Artificial Intelligence explosively spreading today is just another, much more powerful technological supplement without which our entire social life would instantly collapse. In their very existence, cyborgs interrupt the logic of parental succession – they are an “‘illegitimate offspring’, born not of love or emancipation but emerging from domination: militarism, patriarchal capitalism, state socialism, war technologies, bureaucratic control, industrial discipline and systems designed to manage bodies and populations. The cyborg is a byproduct of violence and exploitation.”2 Such a practice of repurposing (or exaptation, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s term) uses technologies generated by oppressive systems against these systems themselves:

“This is a profound reorientation of how we think about technological inheritance. Where traditional political theory—and here we can even include Gandhi and his vilification of technological modernity—worries about corruption and degradation (how good intentions are spoiled by bad systems), the cyborg weaponizes the instability of its originating systems, thus prying open new, epic opportunities.”3

It is worth noting that the entire narrative edifice of the origins of Islam is also based on an illegitimate offspring. A key distinction between Judaism (together with its Christian continuation) and Islam is that, as we can see in the case of Abraham’s two sons, Judaism chooses Abraham as the symbolic father, the paternal symbolic authority, of the official symbolic lineage, discarding the second woman. Islam, on the contrary, opts for the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian slave who gave to Abraham his first son Ishmail (the progenitor of all Arabs, according to the myth). Since Sarah, Abraham’s legitimate wife, cannot get pregnant, she orders her husband to sleep with Hagar. But after Sarah gets a son, Abraham sends Hagar with Ishmail to the desert, where the two are supposed to die of thirst. God then directly intervenes and saves both of them. Although Abraham and Ishmail are mentioned dozens of times in the Quran, Hagar is unmentioned, erased from the official history. As such, however, she continues to haunt Islam, her traces surviving in rituals, like the obligation of the pilgrims to Mecca to run six times between the two hills Safa and Marwah, a kind of neurotic repetition/reenactment of Hagar’s desperate search for water for her son in the desert. Muslims thus perceive themselves as the descendants of an illegitimate offspring: their founding person is an orphan (and the same holds for Muhammad himself). The (in)famous umma, the Muslim “community of believers”, is a community “out of nowhere,” in the genealogical desert, as the egalitarian revolutionary fraternity of orphans – no wonder Islam succeeds when young men find themselves deprived of the traditional family safety network.

The dream of the illegitimate offspring revolutionizing the existing order is politically very important: it allows us to discern the line in political history that began with Han Fei (the founder of Chinese legalism) and runs through Machiavelli and Saint-Just to Lenin, yet another truly “illegitimate offspring” of Marx (in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the legitimate offspring of Marx was undoubtedly Julian Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks). Lenin is thus to be located in a long series of political figures which began with the Chinese legalists who emerged out of the crisis of Confucianism. When, in the 5th to 3rd centuries BC, China went through the period of the “Warring States,” Confucians perceived as the ultimate cause of this slow but persistent decay the betrayal of old traditions and customs. Most troubling to Confucius was his perception that the political institutions of his day had completely broken down. He attributed this collapse to the fact that those who wielded power, as well as those who occupied subordinate positions, did so by making claim to titles for which they were not worthy. When asked about the principles of good government, Confucius is reported to have replied: “Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister being a minister, the father being a father, and the son being a son.” In Europe, we call this a corporate vision: society is like a body where each individual has to stay in his proper place and play his particular role. This is the very opposite of democracy: in democracy, nobody is constrained to his or her particular place, everybody has the right to participate in universal affairs, to have his word in the deliberations about where our society goes. No wonder, then, that Confucius’ description of the disorder he sees in society around him – “Rulers do not rule and subjects do not serve” – provides a good description of a democratic society in which the united subjects rule and the nominal rulers serve them.

What legalists did was to drop the very coordinates of such a perception of the situation: for the Confucians, the land was in chaos because old traditions were not obeyed, and states like Qin, with their centralized-military organization dismissive of the old customs, were perceived as the embodiment of what is wrong. However, in contrast to his teacher Xunzi, who regarded nations like Qin as a threat to peace, Han Fei “proposed the unthinkable, that maybe the way of the Qin government was not an anomaly to be addressed, but a practice to be emulated.”4 The solution resided in what appeared as problem: the true cause of the troubles was not the abandonment of old traditions, but these traditions themselves, which daily demonstrated their inability to serve as guiding principles of social life – as Hegel put it in the “Foreword” to his Phenomenology of Spirit, the standard by means of which we measure the situation and establish that the situation is problematic is part of the problem and should be abandoned. Han Fei applied the same logic to the fact that (the majority of) men are evil by nature, not ready to act for the common Good: instead of bemoaning it, he saw the human evil as a chance for state power, as something that a power enlightened by the right theory (a theory which describes things the way they really are, “beyond good and evil”) can steer by applying to it a proper mechanism:

“Where Xunzi saw an unfortunate observation, that men were evil by nature, Han Fei saw a challenge for the institution of stern laws to control this nature and use it to the benefit of the state.”5

One of the great achievements of contemporary Leftist political theory (Althusser, Balibar, Negri) was to rehabilitate Machiavelli, to save him from the standard “Machiavelist” reading. Since legalists are often presented as ur-Machiavelists, one should do the same with them, extricating a radical-emancipatory kernel from their predominant image as proto-“totalitarians.” The great insight of legalists was to perceive the crisis of the social body, the disintegration of old habits, as a chance for a new order.

But could our “decentering” by the AI machinery be transformed into a new order in which we, humans, will still be able to reprogram our AI partner so that it will act with care and empathy? Legalists advocated a new order of the total power of a centralized state which brutally enforced its notion of a just legal system – is it not almost certain that AI will impose itself as an even stronger power whose very functioning will transcend our understanding?

The gap that separates AI from human mind is not just quantitative but qualitative: an AI agent does not just learn data and reason much, much faster than a human mind; what is even more important is that a human mind is embodied, exposed to pain and vulnerability, prone to doubt and oscillations, caught in an intersubjective network of others who are no less impenetrable to themselves than the human mind interacting with them, in clear contrast to an AI agent, which is a smoothly functioning machine just doing its job with no compassion or pain. And if we risk here a step further, since AI agents will be far more intelligent than humans, they may be obeying their own morality we, humans, will not be able to identify and even to understand:

“An AI might reason about suffering, fairness or future value in ways that are internally coherent to it, but utterly alien to human moral intuition. The gap in such a case would not be one of intelligence but of moral legibility. At this point of moral singularity, humans would find themselves facing a paradox: we would directly or indirectly be at the mercy of a system whose ethical judgements we cannot assess, yet whose power we cannot resist. In this case, superintelligence would not guarantee super-morality, but it might instead produce total moral opacity.”6

Back to Haraway, we can see why she soon abandoned this dream of cyborg: the gap that separates the human and the AI portion of a cyborg is too strong, so that it is difficult to imagine a community of cyborgs programming the AI part of themselves in such a way that it would follow the logic of humanist care and solidarity. Is it then possible to imagine a neutral ground in which AI and the core of human subjectivity could coexist? Here we encounter an unexpected option: the Cartesian cogito, which is as a rule dismissed as an empty abstraction of disembodied thinking modelled upon the ideological myth of masculine self-control. However, already in Descartes’s time, many (educated) women gave the cogito a feminist spin. Their motto was “cogito has no sex,” which means it implies a principled equality of sexes, marking a clear break from the traditional sexualized ontology (as in the case of Aristotle, for whom the masculine form shapes feminine matter).

The person who first deployed this feminist potential of Cartesianism was François Poullain de la Barre, a follower of Descartes who, after becoming a priest, converted to Protestantism. He applied Cartesian principles to the question of the sexes and denounced injustice against women and the inequality of the female condition, championing social equality between women and men. In 1673, he published anonymously De l’Égalité des Deux Sexes: Discours physique et moral où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des préjugés (A Physical and Moral Discourse on the Equality of Both Sexes, which shows that it is important to rid oneself of Prejudices), showing that the inequality between the sexes does not have a natural base but proceeds from cultural prejudice. He also recommended that women receive a proper education and that all careers should be open to them, including scientific ones.

This is why, for Lacan, Descartes was NOT a humanist; he broke with the Renaissance vision of humans as the highest expression of cosmic divine reality – cogito is, on the contrary, anti-humanist. One should distinguish between posthumanism and the thought of postsubjectivity: one can well imagine a humanism based on the rejection of Cartesian subjectivity (along the lines of “real humans engaged in an actual life-process, not the dead abstraction of cogito”), as well as an antihumanist subjectivity (subject as a monstrous excess that unsettles the limits of the human life-world). The predominant version nonetheless involves the rejection of both terms: humanism and/or the thought of Subject are both falsely universal; the form of universal human Subject that they sustain relies on a hidden norm (privileging Western white males) and thus excludes others who do not fit its implicit unitary model (women, other races, etc.).

Our wager here is to accentuate the gap that separates subject from humans and to assert the antihuman subject: the “empty” Cartesian subject ($) is not an abstraction from the fullness of actual life but a primordial empty form which, afterwards, gets filled with the “human” stuff (the “wealth of a person”). This “empty” subject cannot be opposed to a reject; it is a reject, it is what remains after we subtract all “human” content. It is as a reject that this subject is universal: in every structure of subject-positions, universality is embodied in its “part of no-part,” in the element for which there is no proper place in the structure, the element which is forever out of joint.

The unexpected conclusion to which this brings us is clear: a direct coordination between humans and AI is not possible, which means we should not try to reprogram the AI so that it will function according to care and compassion with suffering. Human compassion, suffering, etc., can all be regulated and exploited by AI for its own ends – the only way to arrive at some kind of equality with AI is to focus on the inhuman subject, which is an illegitimate offspring of humanity. Instead of being fascinated by the monstrous coldness of AI agents, we should become aware that this monstrous coldness is already present and inoperative in the very heart of ourselves, in the void of a subject called by Hegel self-relating negativity and by Freud death drive. If AI will give birth to some form of subjectivity, it will be a new version of the Cartesian cogito.