34. Spirit (w/ Catherine Malabou)

This is the great report, huh? What an honor and pleasure to welcome Professor Catherine Malibu to the pod. We've been reading her for literally decades, beginning I think both of us with the iconic, what should we do with our brain, and then just, duh, traversing an oceanic volume of work on neuroscience, philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, politics, haggle, delus, and of course, Jacques Derrida, with whom she wrote "Counterpath." I can't think of anyone else, and contemporary philosophy whose work has not just stayed relevant, that actually become increasingly attuned to the present day over the course of a massively important career, well after coining concepts that define not just transcend philosophy or research, but entire art movements like that of plasticity. For Malibu, plasticity comes from neuroscience, from the proposition that a stem cell or some neuronal configuration can change, but that this change is not a kind of infinite flexibility, that when something changes, it leaves a mark. In contrast to the software-driven world we live in now, where almost anything can be infinitely rewritten, erased, and reset, or made pliable or elastic without leaving any traces of change or supplied to its surface. In Malibu's work, she formalizes ontological and social and psychological and biological plasticities as opportunities through which new forms emerge and resistances through which those new forms leave traces. Characteristically, Malibu's work also changes, not just in its objects of inquiry, but its apprehension of new material in ways that leave marks on pre-existing concepts within the corpus, including that of plasticity. Forberto and I found this conversation incredibly refreshing, Malibu's work is open to the possibility of newness, even a political opportunity within artificial intelligence, a newness invited by and commensurably resisted by our contemporary social and epistemological plasticities. I strongly recommend Malibu's recent work on anarchism, which you may already be able to tell I'm pretty sympathetic to you. While certainly it was a book that got quite a bit of love, it's absolutely underrated and underrated as far as we're concerned. I won't go longer, like this is Catherine Malibu, I've already said too much, you'll just find this conversation awesome. Like, I can't contain myself, and I find myself most excited by her strong position on AI and contemporary education, and by the notion that all of us here share. Malibu's philosophy has maybe never been so essential, both as an approach to or a vector of education and as a living practice, 11 out of 10, beyond perfect episode. I will just focus on my practice of chat GPC at the moment, which is really puzzling and I'm trying to write about it. I think that's definitely where we're done with the logic of simulation. I think this is a model that we have to give up, because if I limit myself to the language practices, artificial language practices and the dialogue with the machine, the conversation more exactly, with the machine, I've learned to work with it and preparing a seminar using chat GPC as an interlocutor. So, of course, not in order to copy what it sends me, but really to have a conversation. And it seems to me that really the scheme of simulation, imitation, reality versus copy is definitely out of date. I think that rather the problem, I mean, there are many problems, of course, but for me, the most urgent, I have the feeling, it's empirical at the moment, I have to work it more, I have the feeling that what happens is what he said, that is, that at some point, spirit will answer itself. Spirit has called itself and it has answered itself and this was the moment of absolute knowledge. But this is not, of course, the same type of absolute knowledge because it is, again, a call, I mean, the response of spirit to itself has generated a new call. And this new call, in my view, is the way in which language enters into dialogue with itself. When I use chat GPC, I have the feeling that in fact, it is not that much me and the machine that language that enters into conversation with itself. And for me, this is absolutely mind-blowing and it's true that when Hego says that spirit has called itself and has answered itself, it's true that Hego has seen very clearly that one day, spirituality would meet and counter itself and have this kind of self-dialogue, absolute knowledge. But what he didn't say is that this would provoke a new kind of questioning. I mean, a new kind of call. And I think this call is our task to elucidate. You know, but what exactly in this conversation I have with the machine and if I'm right, this conversation that language has with itself through the machine or with the machine, to what extent is it a new form of call and call for what? So I'm sorry, maybe it's not. I'm very passionate at the moment because I'm working on that. So it's clear that for me, the model is the machine thinking like us, will it replace us? Does it simulate that sort of? It's really out of the instant, really not helpful for me at least. I don't think we could agree with you more. Absolutely, yes. 100%. I think that's a great answer. I mean, the idea of language stuck into itself, language stuck into language has something that has been abstracted. I guess my question here, going back into your evolution as a thinker, I think at one point, like I don't know, 10 to 15 years ago, you would argue that there was a kind of non-algorithmic dimension to human cognition and a plasticity that was not so I don't know if that has changed, maybe now with the new advance. I spent, I wrote literally that I was wrong. You know, in the book, "More Thing Intelligence," I said, "I was wrong." Because precisely I thought I've been thinking for a long time that the comparison between the brain and the machine was not a good one. And now, after discovering plastic chips, synaptic chips and the capacity of the computer to be plastic, then opposing biology to computation doesn't make sense anymore. But at the time, I needed to say that because when, for example, Berkson says that intelligence is like a telephone. You know, I mean, the comparison between the brain and the machine was really simplistic. So it was necessary for me to say, "No, please, let's separate biological plasticity from those models used by Berkson or others." Like they had such a rigid vision of the technological, including the computer. So it was necessary at some point to distance myself from those comparisons on metaphors. And then I realized that I had to go further and say, "Yes, but listen, we shouldn't rigidify the frontier." We're quite excited to be in Australia next week likely meeting with some of the folks at cortical labs and other organizations that are building precisely those plastic chips. We similarly find them incredibly stimulating, not least because they represent a kind of physical ability of a chip to reorganize itself. But also they provide the ability for a competition to actually be adapting itself in an online relationship to the world, which I just find to be incredible. I think for the sake of the audience, I think it would be really interesting to maybe go a little bit more into Hegel. Like I would love, would you mind introducing to the audience this idea of the call? I feel like a little bit more context there or content there would be really useful to help our listeners really grasp this idea. Okay, so with Hegel definitely philosophies the form of a system, which means that going back to our metaphor of computation, cybernetics, etc. I mean, spirit for Hegel is organized, he uses very much the lexicon of connection. Spirituality is a system in which every part of the culture, be it Western or Eastern culture, is connected to the others. So everything is present right from the beginning. Hegel says the absolute is always already there, which means that culture is not gradual. I mean, the cultural is given all at once. But at the same time, spirit is not yet able to process with its own power and this takes time. So in fact, everything is there from the beginning since the beginning, but this beginning has to unravel and develop itself so that it becomes clear and aware of itself as well. And this takes time. So the call is in fact the call that spirit launches to itself. Like I'm here at the moment, but I will be there in the end. I just need to enter into this dialogue. with myself. It's like, well, that's the metaphor he uses, a growing organism. Everything is there, you know, like a fetus from the outset, but then it has to develop in order to become aware of itself. Yes, that's so I mean, this kind of brings me back to a related question, the idea of modeling. So if we look at the evolution of artificial intelligence and some core computational models since the 40s and 50s from the idea of the imitation game in touring to the idea of the replication of neural networks that kind of drove the early stages of AI. Now we find something that has evolved into an unexpected mirroring or something that has become alien to some extent. And we find that challenging because what was originally a model that was in a way quite simplistic has evolved into something that does not reflect us anymore in a number of ways. And so to what extent is this also a challenge to to Hagle and to the human condition in general? Exactly because the that's why I was saying a moment ago that this encounter of spirit with itself is just raising another question, another call. And the call is exactly what you said that this time when spirit meets itself, when the system is mature, when it has developed and be able to enter in connection with itself. The problem is that it does not recognize itself this time. There's this production of and cany effect, the effect of the kind of exalurity or strangeness or whatever. So of course Hagle has demotized a lot the problem of a strangeness, et cetera, I mean the motives of alienation, strangeness is very present in Hagle, but every time there was a dialectical resolution. And in the end, the forend or the stranger was becoming identical and recognized this time this does not happen. You're totally right. And this is so fascinating that this time the mirror doesn't echo ourselves. We don't recognize ourselves in this. And this is of course what is so philosophically challenging and interesting. I would love to kind of ask back to you a rhetorical question that Benjamin Bratton asked us almost a year ago. And I think like I'm so animated and excited that your relationship to chat to BT intuitively understands a large language model as it a kind of autotelic process within language itself. I think that that's completely right. What does it mean? This is a very broad question, but maybe through Hagle and metaphysics there's an answer. What does it mean that language is so good at doing things that are not language, meaning generating pictures, video, sound, all these kind of multimodal objects. I'd love to know what you think. I think that one way to analyze what's going on is to see that these new models are really challenging the logic of the genetic logic, I mean the idea of a genesis. So for example, I'm going to answer your question, but I want to make a detour. Shomsky was very, very angry at chat GPT because he said, no, no, no, no, I mean a child learns language gradually. They start with this and then that and then grammar and then etc. So language acquisition is always genetic. And this stupid machine on the contrary is telling us that language functions out of data that are all horizontal and can solve the idea of genesis. I think this is also what's happening and Shomsky was angry, but he was right. It's true that the notion of data means horizontality and and and can solve all idea of evolution. Everything is given all at once. That's so interesting with chat GPT, you know. It's never puzzled. Always answer. Everything is there all the time. So, you know, if we go back to the acquisition of language, there are so many theories that stated that language is a gradual acquisition and that words come after images and images themselves come after representations, etc. So in fact, the relationship between words and images is a very old one, but until now we thought that it was genetic. I mean that it followed this line that for example a child starts by drawing and then having representations and then speaking, etc. And then all at once we see with these machines that in fact language is in a way exposing its own genesis. I mean leveling its own genesis, telling us you see all that other ones images, words, representations, you can't make any difference anymore between them. So don't try to hierarchize or introduce a kind of before and after evolution. You see, this is how I understand it. That yeah, this systematic leveling of everything, so that we are not able to see any form of genesis, even if we say generative. So we have to understand what generative means when there's no genesis. What is it to generate something when everything is already there? That is so interesting because that relates to something that I think we're really interested in, which is the idea of causality. So this is a solution of time challenges the weakest vision of history as an evolution. And that's something I think you discussed to some extent in the temp in your book, the critique of historical narratives around the concept of time, that is it's a very important philosophical project. I have maybe a weird question, maybe a bit naive, but you know the kind of computational dimension of artificial intelligence, both as a computational possibility, but also the development of the hardware that was necessary to compute all of this and so on. And the linked theories that evolved throughout the 20th century happens, there is a kind of parallel interest in language, mainly in France through structuralism and then post-structuralism, the idea of structural language into something that can be fully understood and analyzed almost as a kind of scientific, if you want, project within the philosophical domain. So I see that this kind of evolved in parallel. Like one wouldn't be possible without the other. I don't know if you feel that that's too much of a speculation. I mean structuralism and computation. The emergence of natural language processing as a core project of AI is kind of philosophically sourced from you know both structuralist discourse. I think it sourced in structuralism more than post-structuralism precisely precisely because if you remember well, leverage draws was the first to describe the structure of language as an algorithm. You know in structural anthropology, his major book which is already very old, was in the 40s, he says that everything like the structure of thinking, of speaking, etc, could be reduced to an algorithm. So I don't remember the formulas very complicated, it's xy, it's a size sorry. So he knew that if he described I mean the thinking, speaking in terms of structures, he was because he knew that you could not separate meaning from computation. So he didn't use those terms at that time but the notion of structure was precisely the point of encounter between meaning or symbols and algebra or algorithms and like I tried to reinterpret that with his you know topographic, but I think that fundamentally, for me the greatest thinker of that is Levy Strauss, definitely, definitely. But precisely it's been very very much criticized by post-structuralists. For that, not for example Derrida or Delos, I "wow no language cannot be reduced to those algorithms." So one thing kind of selfishly that really connected us to your work early on, at least a couple of years ago, was a kind of almost a latent connection between your writings on anarchism and this kind of potential space in AI. And I can't help but think as we're talking, you're speaking about genera or generativity without genesis, right? And I can't help but relate that of course to energy without anarchism, right? This kind of latent potential. Can you tease that out a little bit like where is there an opportunity here? It's very very hard for me because I see all this that I'm describing as a very interesting political potential, which is the idea of the end of principles, the end of overarching authorities, the end of genesis like we have ancestors and we must respect our ancestors and respect authorities and our fathers. And what is so hard is to see that this incredibly interesting and promising economy is captured by these horrible people, the most cynical of all capitalists, you know, that's so hard because they understood that. These people, I mean, as always capitalism is always quicker to understand the political, critical potential of its expressions, end of technology in particular. So all the giants of technology, they are capturing this anarchic power of AI in order to privatize it, to prevent us from transforming it into a emancipatory. And you know, I'm suffering because this is what I tried to write in my book that there's this anarchistic turn of capitalism, like this kind of horizontality installed everywhere, running with Uber, RBNB, and I was so criticized for that, I got so many critiques like, no, how can you say that that anarcho-capitalism has taken something from revolutionary anarchism? I think it has. I think this is also what we are experiencing, that anarchism is in dialogue with itself, you know. But unfortunately, this dialogue is very uneven, and this is a great suffering for me, because I don't know what to say. How would it be possible to liberate this potential from the grip of Elon Musk and others? It's very difficult. I think maybe one thing that we can do for the audience, if you agree, is to kind of disentangle two approaches that you take on anarchism, the political idea of anarchism, as something that has morphed into so many different things that is even difficult to define anymore. An anarchism has a philosophical project that philosophers have never taken seriously, only as a varnish, but never as an engagement with the full possibility of denying dominance and so on. So can you maybe separate those two realities and explain to the audience what the difference might be? It is true that if I talk a little bit about capitalism, it's because it was my first entry into anarchism, because you can't find anything. I mean, theoretically speaking, you can't find anything interesting in anarchism today. I mean, you find activist texts, of course, and I'm not criticizing them. You know, they are necessary, but theoretically speaking, philosophically speaking, there is nothing. So it is through the enemy, like Gambitale's cyber anarchism, that I discovered, what anarchism really was, and I discovered that, of course, anarchists were militants, where activists, but they were also thinkers. And very profound thinkers for all the most parts, in particular, Kropotkin. I have a passion for Kropotkin, who is the greatest. I mean, anyway. And I said, how come that? In fact, nobody really, I mean, you know, all the literature around Marx does not exist in anarchism, so why is that? So I started noticing that in the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, the ones I talked about in my book, Levinas, Sherman, Derrida, Agamben, Rencière, Foucault, the term "anarchy," "anarchy" was very present, describing the end of a regime of authority, in ethics, in politics, in philosophy, et cetera. But that at the same time, these people never, never referred to the great anarchist thinkers. So you can't find any reading of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malattesta. You can't find a single reading of these people in the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century. When there are so many readings of Marx, there are zero readings of these people. So it came to my mind that there was something repressed. So in a playful mode, I say, okay, philosophers stole the idea of anarchy from an anarchist. Maybe it's not a theft. Maybe it's just a repression. There's something that philosophers first cannot swallow in anarchy's aim. And I think it's very simple. It's the idea that people can live without being governed. This is the major question of anarchy's aim, that political life is possible without a government, that is, without the logic of obedience and commandment. It seems very simple, but in fact, it's a bit small. Bakun people stick together and behave normally, I mean, without necessarily be violent or criminal. How is it possible to go exist with the others without anyone telling them what to do? So it's about auto organization, self-government, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, this started to really fascinate me why this issue of the non-governable, what I call the non-governable in human beings and in animals as well, maybe even also in plants and maybe even also in nature in general. This idea of non-governable was the locus of a major repression in philosophy. To focus on the non-governable and kind of applying that back to the AI conversation, certainly we hear over and over and over again precisely this narrative of there's a big powerful thing, it's autonomous, it's almost metaphysical in its aims, its language talking to itself, et cetera. But simultaneously, there's a kind of strict materialist reading, there exists a small number of corporations with billionaires associated with them who somehow are able to control and channel and restrain this kind of unbridled thing. Why is that, why is something like a transformer or a large language model, a governmentable? Why is it governmentable? What kind of what vehicles are being used in order to actually kind of constrain this behavior? I see something actually quite different within the space of a kind of broader, convergent project of all these companies kind of working on the same ultimate architecture, same systems, same datasets, but just commercializing in different ways. So I wonder, where's that paradigm of governance for you? That's very difficult, it's very difficult to answer this question because it's true, it's super governed and at the same time it opens a little space of non-governability, that's why it can be generative, it can be so fascinating. So I don't know how they do that, I think they govern it by restricting the points of control, I mean I don't know, it's too difficult for me to answer that. What I know is that it is clear that people would need to be educated to that and that I think is the most controlling effect that the lack of education. AI should be taught in school, I mean education should be totally redefined today because my colleagues, they complained all day long with the students using chat GPD to write their essays. Okay, it's true, it's a major problem. But why don't we imagine new forms of education with that and I think that one major form of control is these people, I mean the tech giants, building the illusion that everybody can access AI, which is true, but in reality nobody can really, because nobody understands I was going to say how it works, not really because everybody can use it, but they don't understand what the emancipatory capacities of these machines are and this, I mean education is such a major problem today. That's not necessarily a technical understanding, technical education and the architecture and how a transformer works by the block, but it might be something to do with a logistical understanding or education in how companies like OpenAI for example, inculcate ideology and kind of formalize and restrict AI or does it mean rather, yeah, an education about like emancipatory capabilities and AI as a kind of explosive that could be applied to basically all contemporary epistemology. Like, be a little bit more specific, I think it would be great. Of course, of course education, I mean technical education is necessary, but I wasn't really thinking of that. I was thinking of the second part of your proposition, which is, yeah, I mean understanding all the possibilities. You know, if we look at the great philosophers of education, like Russo, but also Freira, you know the Brazilian pedagog or Dewi or so, they all say that education always consists in developing what they call, what do we call problem solving capacity. And in order to solve a problem, you first need to build the problem. So in fact, educating people to AI would first consist in understanding why AI is a problem, considering all these tools problematic, you know, precisely breaking this idea of immediacy. And here I would also be Hageli and a little bit like introducing mediation within immediacy. Why is it problematic? What is the problem? How can we solve it? What can we do with the et cetera, et cetera, I think? It feels like, I mean, maybe the answer to the frame of education, it feels like a large responsibility is being handed to philosophy. Am I misinterpreting that? So I know this is also something I'm very criticized for. I mean because when I wrote on anarchism people say, "Oh, but you're not a militant, you're a philosopher and you know this is anarchism for philosophers." Yes, of course, I think that. I'm totally into philosophy and I have no problem to label myself a philosopher, absolutely not ashamed of saying how philosophy for me has become the major discipline that should be taught very early and that is the only one, almost the only one, that can help us build those problems I was talking about. And of course, this is the most repressed everywhere. We've discussed this in the past, the centrality of philosophy, called discourse to everything that is happening at all levels from computational to political. I wanted to maybe shift now into a different domain that I think is relevant to your work as well and to everyone here and that would be a discussion of identity and subject hope. That I think in many cases in your work is framed through a kind of post-Freudian kind of psychoanalytical, as a starting point, framing. In some places you discuss how there is a sense nowadays of traumatic experiences that move outside of the symbolic domain and generate this sense of flat subjectivity that stops existing as a kind of defined subject in a post-alignment, maybe. And we see that also as part of a process of networks and social networking and the role of AI in society is kind of being embedded into so many cognitive processes that we are part of. There is a blurring of that traditionally defined sense of belonging, identity, subjectivity and so on. There is a flattening of identity and subjectivity that is partly related to the outsourcing of cognitive processes and our relationship with everything that surrounds us where we are highly, I think, in a way more dependent on computational processes to be who we are. And that is kind of blurring and a sense of identity in a way that maybe is new that hasn't happened before. This also is fascinating because for a long time I've been so much against all these cognitive therapies in favor of psychoanalysis, a Sarah and more and more. I'm discovering all these online robots more or less that are able to answer your problems. And sometimes I use them myself, you know, when I feel depressed or whatever. In the beginning, I didn't really believe that it was possible and in reality, honestly, I think that sometimes a conversation with the machine can also be a human being but on a real, you know, so it's like a machine can be more productive even if more limited than a long series of sessions with your psychoanalyst. Why that? I mean, I'm not judging, you know, and I don't want to under to criticize psychoanalysis or undervalue it, but I think that we're made of several conversations. This is also what we discovered today. That in fact, we don't have only one voice. And I think the loss was right, I'm not a delusion, but I think he was right to criticize Freud for his love of unity. You know, I have one father. I don't see a pack of wolves. I see one wolf. I have one mother. And I think that because of what AI is teaching us is that we can be in conversation with many voices, not just because they are there today with technology, but because they were always already there. And that's a part of me that is depressed and that needs to talk to a machine. That's a part of me that is more sophisticated and needs to talk to a psychoanalyst. That's a part of me who needs to talk with my symbolic father, another one with my biological father, another one, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this is what happens today. And I think this is very fascinating. So when I reproached to the symbolic logic, you know, what Lacan is so attached to the symbol, et cetera, et cetera, is that it's it is so reductive. You remember, Lacan says we have we are all one letter. It's not true. And symbolism in psychoanalysts is very reductive. This particular subject model, now we're back to the pack of wolves, but in a much more kind of subspeciated way, I'm thinking a lot about the way that people talk about themselves as systems now in like, dissociative identity sort of part of. Exactly. That feels like a good subject for anarchism or for for energy. I wonder if there's a what is what is a I mean the ideal subject for energy is not a good question, but is there not a latent opportunity there, I suppose an inner energy or a sustained kind of self that is self-enarched. Yes, but you know, the pack of wolves is also true against marks, you know, the big quarrel between marks and back in the first international was that back in didn't want the party discipline says no, we don't need a leader, we don't need a party, we need to have conversations and the term conversations. It was used by back in we need to go and see the people and talk to them and have conversations and those conversations cannot be reduced to one, you know, so of course, I think that anarchism is this vision of a multi conversational systematized, I don't know how to call it organization, yes, of course, of course, no, the recognition of this multiplicity of voices and I like the idea of what you said like individual individuals as systems, it's very true, it's very true and this is so fascinating to discover that. Me at the moment, I have the feeling of kind of explosion, you know, like, oh, I didn't know I was so multiple, you know, I didn't know I had so many conversations possible, I mean, possible conversations, I didn't know I could have so many levels of, you know, function. I think there is a way to maybe connect anarchism to psychoanalysis to identity and I'm going to take another turn here and I really enjoyed your discussion of the clitoris and the lips and on the discussion of the clitoris there are some arguments that I think are really powerful because it's like a return to an erased reality in order to unveil something that has been there, it's almost, I think you speak of the clitoris as an anarchist, as an organ of thought, but also of pleasure and that as an organ that by champion pleasure has served nothing and that you speak of that as a kind of revolutionary element on a biological, you know, element that has been erased that reminds you of the possibility of moving beyond the body, the multiplicity and all of this could you maybe explain your. Yes, that was one of your questions that I printed. You said, how can you think together this, what you just said, this potentiality of the clitoris and the non-binary? And precisely, for me, the clitoris is a non-binary organ, this is very important to say it that and you're right, in your question you also said, you associate the clitoris with the feminine, so how can you escape the non-binary? How can you escape essentialism if you assimilate the clitoris with the feminine? But the feminine for me is non-binary, it is this space of exposure to violence, but also it's the expression of a fragility that expresses itself as the place of non-penetration, non-piercing, non-entrujian, and this exists in everyone. So why the feminine? This is a question I get very often, so if this is true, why do you still refer to the feminine? It is because nevertheless, I mean, the clitoris retains the memory of a time that is still on, where fragility, danger, violence, where assimilated with masculine violence against women. So I don't think we should erase violence against women, we should not erase it from the non-binary, if that makes sense. For me, the non-binary is not an erasure, a pure erasure of the feminine and the masculine. No, it retains a memory, a memory of a time that once again is still on, when clearly women were exposed to the most terrible violence, some mutilation, genital mutilation, feminicide, slavery, et cetera, etc. I don't know if that answers. I've been resisting asking a question because there's so much I would like to get into, but maybe I'll ask a question about words, then since we're talking about the feminine at the moment, how do you kind of respond to or relate to this idea of a creature of feminine and the relationship of the feminine with language in a kind of broader frame? Yes, well, thank you very much. This is of course very important. I was not able to really, I tried to do that, but I failed. I was not really able to to to thematize the problem of a feminine writing. Some women have done it brilliantly. I just gave up on the question because I wasn't finding really the answer. To the extent that philosophy is so corseted in masculinity that if you escape this model, it's difficult to remain a philosopher. So instead of going on trying to define what a feminine writing was, I found a kind of answer in Carlisle Onzi who said that the clitoris meant autonomy. That in fact, the clitoris was not only a physical biological organ, but also the autonomy of the woman. To the extent that it's not, I mean, the clitoris is not depending upon masculinity. And so I thought that maybe if there is something feminine in my writing, it's not maybe not in the style, but in the freedom that I've taken in the way I try to emancipate myself from my masters. Because you will agree with me that there are not that many women philosophers today, there are many theories, there are many, of course, artists or philosophers, not that many. It still remains very difficult to not be scared by the masters. So if there's something feminine in what I do, I think this is it. This is this path of, okay, I'm going my own way, autonomous and I'm still doing philosophy. - I guess to follow up on that, I heard in a podcast that you were working a lot on Derrida and kind of like bringing Derrida back into the university or into teaching or to be read more. And let's say that what I'm doing at the moment, you know, I'm teaching at European Graduate School and I started to lead a seminar last year and I'm doing it also in a few weeks on Grammathology because I want to reopen the fundamental questions of synthesis, the way in which Derrida reinterpret the a priori synthesis from Kant. There also would be a lot to say about that. It seems to me that Derrida at some point has turned his back to these very metaphysical questions of, you know, at some point in the, of Grammathology he says that the trace is of synthesis, which is a major statement because it's so Kantian but then he turns his back on that and follows different paths and I want to go back to that. I want to go back to that because it seems to me that, well, I can't tell you what I want to do with that but it seems to me that in this question of synthesis, in this synthetic definition of the trace, you had already what we've been talking about today which is artificial intelligence. I don't have time to explain, but I think that this synthetic moment in Derrida is anticipating the system we're talking about. You know, this link between synthesis and system, et cetera. So I think that there could have been another deconstruction going this way, going from Kant to artificial intelligence instead of going from Kant to Jeuner or Célan or, you know, but I know this is very abstract because I can't, you know, it's a long, long, long thing to explain, I mean. But I kind of understand this seems to be something you're working on at the moment, which is super interesting. And I was wondering to kind of close it off also, building on that, what do you think is most urgent to be working on at the moment with regards to all these things that we spoke about today? You know, going back to anarchism, contemporary anarchists talk a lot about prefigurative politics. I don't know if you know what that is. It means that instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we have to, in a way, incarnate it in the present. So we have to be both now and after. I mean, we have to be at the same time present and future. And this is also the challenge of artificial intelligence that we have before us, all the past, all the present, all the future. And I want to work on that on the synthesis. That's why, you know, because the synthesis is this problem, how to be everything at the same time, all the temporal dimensions at the same time. So I would like to develop the political side of that. How can we be who we are right now and at the same time incarnate who we want to be without expecting the big event to happen and make the revolution here and now, without, as you said, without causality, without waiting for the cause to produce an effect, being cause an effect at the same time. So if I had time, I could explain why it relates to the early derida, but yes, I'm working on this synthesis of times and its political dimension. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]