Resource

Does artificial artificial intelligence not beckon us like a ghost? Why do we draw back? Is it because we fear that what should only emerge from the interiority of a real, human depth, might issue from a spectral presence without a name? What if one day we could no longer be made to read or write? What if it became impossible to tell if someone actually read what is written about or wrote what appears beneath the signature of their name?1 We might prepare for a future in which this event would not obliterate the very possibility of scholarship in the humanities or humanity as such. Is it possible to face this spectre without seeing ourselves defaced?2 To foresee a future wherein the singularity of the human is not undone by that of the technological?

Art thou a scholar?3

Footnotes

  1. Cf. Derrida’s Signature Event Context , Echographies of Television, and also Agamben’s Signature of All Things

  2. Cf. Autobiography as De-facement and other instances of this theme in de Man’s works.

  3. Cf. Hamlet (Act I)