110 x 180mm, 185 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2024

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?   

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