Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh

Having inadvertently swerved into an ecclesiastical territory with Issue Two, it is auspicious, to say the least, that our next publication grabs the theological bull by the horns and drives it all the way back to where we started: artificial intelligence. Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence, written by Wittgenstein and Foucault scholar Giorgio Vachnadze, draws a circle around many topics that have been important to Becoming’s editorial line, from epistemology to cybernetics, biopolitics, philosophy of music and semiology.

The book traces multiple points of overlap between various regimes of truth from the Greco-Roman period through to the AI and cybernetic period, in order to present a continuity that ties together Christian Pastoralism and Neoliberal Self-Governance. The result is a fascinating and detailed examination of western hegemonial doctrines and signifiers: Logos, the Flesh, and the Fall.

Vachnadze leaves us with no conclusion besides a certain feeling in our stomachs, a feeling that often comes when someone makes you aware of something fascinating, but deeply unnerving. The author weaves scripture and theory together in a way which can be as exciting as conspiratorial fictions, and he does so without compromising the respectable position he has established at the point where non- meets sense.