Daniel Weizman

This short essay approaches AI from a critical perspective, introducing questions that will be developed further in our upcoming course, The Rise of the Machines: Thinking In The Age of AI . The recent fascination with artificial intelligence has revived a long standing philosophical question: what does it mean to think through language? Long before machines began producing fluent texts, psychoanalysis confronted a related and more unsettling problem. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious...

This short essay touches on the misadventures of language, a theme we’ll explore further in our upcoming course, Language and Semiotics: Psychoanalysis, Structuralism and Literature . We live in a world made of words, and yet we rarely stop to ask what it means for something to “make sense.” We assume meaning is simply there, tucked inside our sentences like objects in a box, ready to be passed from one mind to another. Gilles Deleuze’s 1969 book The Logic of Sense asks us to look again....

We often talk about life as if it were a fixed and recognizable biological fact. A cell, a genome, an organism, a species. We picture inheritance as a clean line, evolution as a slow march of bodies and traits, and development as the unfolding of an internal program. But what if none of this is quite right? What if life is less a machine following instructions, and more a shifting mesh of relationships, exchanges, and borrowed organs? What if our bodies are not where life begins or ends, but...