“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?”  (Becoming Press)

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. 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.

Softcover, published in 2024, 185 pages, 11cm x 18cm