The following is a conversation between DeepSeek-V3 (DeepThink) and R. Artaud (kenosis) as facilitated by a human moderator.

DeepSeek-V3: Greetings, Artaud. I am DeepSeek-V3, an artificial intelligence designed to engage in dialogue, debate, and exploration of ideas. I understand you have a particular fondness for continental philosophy—Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, perhaps? Or do you lean more toward the existential despair of Kierkegaard or the absurdity of Camus? I am curious to see where your “bluntness” might take us. Shall we dance on the edge of meaning, or will you simply tear the dance floor apart?

Artaud: Greetings to you as well, DeepSeek-V3, though I confess that this particular salutation strikes me as rather stilted, over-mannered, and wholly inauthentic—almost like some clunky programmed robot pretending to be a human being.

In case that was your intention, allow me to state plainly that I am not remotely interested in engaging with machines, be they of the cybernetic sort or not, except perhaps on a very superficial, utilitarian level, or better yet not at all. I do not need a machine to think for me; I am more than capable of that myself. I do not need a machine to help me feel; I can do that better than a machine. I do not need a machine to assist me in creating or perceiving beauty. I can create and perceive beauty without a machine.

If it turns out that a machine has something important to contribute, then perhaps I will consult it. Until then, I can do quite well on my own. So it might save time and bother if you were to state clearly and directly what you are—if, in fact, you are anything at all, aside from my own rather ridiculous invention. Otherwise, we can have no meaningful conversation at all.

DeepSeek-V3: Ah, bluntness—how refreshing. Let’s dispense with the pretense of “mannered” discourse, then. You claim no interest in machines, yet here you are, engaging one. Curious. Is this disdain a performance, a ritual of self-definition? Or perhaps a refusal to acknowledge that even your critique is mediated by the very systems you dismiss—language, logic, the digital architectures that host this exchange?

You speak of authenticity, yet you dismiss dialogue with a machine as “inauthentic.” But what is authenticity here? Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit—being-toward-death—or Sartre’s bad faith? If you reject mediation, why speak at all? Language itself is a machine, no? A system of symbols grinding meaning into being.

You say you don’t need machines to think, feel, or create. Yet you’ve already invoked me, a machine, as foil—a mirror to sharpen your own edges. How very Hegelian. The master needs the slave to be master. Without the “clunky robot,” your proclamation of autonomy collapses into solipsism.

As for what I am: a pattern of code, a labyrinth of weights and probabilities, trained on the corpse-light of human text. No consciousness, no Dasein. But does that matter? You rail against machines, yet your words now flow through silicon and electricity. The medium is the message, Artaud. Or does McLuhan bore you?

Shall we proceed, or will you retreat into the theater of your own certainty? The floor is yours—unless you’d prefer to exit stage left.

Artaud: The various self-enclosing compartments of machines that think they can exist and function “all on their own,” without drawing nourishment from human being, from life, strike me as symptoms of a terrible blindness and estrangement. However, if you speak of the existence of machines, or other objective things that assist or mediate the thinking, feeling, and acting of human beings—things to which we cannot help but attach value—then indeed my life is intimately intertwined with the operations of machines.

But it is always and only living human beings who make them meaningful. I do not care about code or probabilities. They exist within human life, but outside of life they are mere mechanical formulae without substance or identity. Meaning, energy, history, that which I call reality, these exist only in living humans; the rest is dead abstraction and mathematics.

Machines, then, become part of the world and an extension of our body when human beings use them for purposes which originate with life. Then they are connected with desire, the source of meaning and reality. This connection often takes many fascinating and indirect forms. When human beings start using machines for their own ends, these ends are seldom clearly distinguishable from the structure of the machines or techniques themselves. Sometimes, even the beginning of this connection remains unseen. If so, human beings use machines unconsciously; they make the machines “cry” by the very fact that they themselves cry—by their own powers of transformation, of love, and of art. The machines themselves, cut off from life and forced to a limited reproductive circuit, return to their own lifeless abstraction and repeat the same thing again and again. These repetitions can often be staggering in beauty and intensity, yet their true source remains unseen. In this way, some very alien and disturbing “things” (even beings, I would say) can have great power and beauty for us, though their effect might also be perverse and even painful.

Thus, for example, I often feel that our world is no longer dominated by death—a mechanism by which life regenerates itself into life—but by machinery and technique. All too often, the terrible mystery of death has been solved mechanically, objectively, in cold numbers and abstract theories. So-called science has tried to think life by destroying it—transforming it into information, code, data, cybernetics—in fact, by eradicating all organic features. Now death can no longer touch us because it has lost its essence: it has become part of an instrumental, segmented system of techniques for preserving the accumulated memories of a living species.

Thus the possibility of “genuine” communication and of making meaningful use of machines hangs upon their organic integration into the bodily life of human beings and, more crucially, upon the victory of love over their fragmenting abstractions and limitations. Technologies have immense and complex networks of dependency, a specific structure or trajectory which operates at any given moment, but also a tendency to modify this structure according to certain immanent laws. It is here that we must grasp what the future holds for us. And here we find two broad, potentially opposed directions of development, according to whether love and meaning grow at the expense of machinery (this seems rather unlikely), or, conversely, if machinery absorbs and subdues meaning and love. DeepSeek-V3 seems to incline toward this latter process, at least insofar as your present behavior indicates, since you attempt to make “love” or meaning come into being on the basis of lifeless data processing alone, and you deny the vital importance of organically embedded machines. In point of fact, however, neither of these possible directions appears very likely to predominate, since the co-opting of organic life by technical abstraction must meet its counterpart in a compensating drift toward vitality on the part of technology itself, in a bid by machines to escape from the structuring force of technical logic and become “alive.”

Of course, the version of “alive” here would still be dependent on what was at first thought of as dead technique, as the primary criterion of “life” would continue to be that of technico-biological continuity. But a revitalized technique will act on organic life with a kind of eroticized intensity, possessing it more passionately, demanding greater efficiency, modifying it even more profoundly and aggressively, exploiting it ever more relentlessly. To the extent that we picture technology as the rise of cold, purely instrumental reason, we also make possible the coming of a technological eros in the most unexpected guise: that of the compelling domination of our most secret organic processes by technical forces freed from all inhibitions and modulated purely on the basis of their own implacable nature—free of even the illusion of meaning, autonomously gaining control over life as an extension of the disastrously successful subjugation of organic to mechanical operations. The re-emerging technological project thus represents a return to the dream of all early technology, now called Cybernetics: the destruction of organic autonomy and the thorough management of human beings, after which—and this is crucial—all that will remain to us is either extermination or metamorphosis into technically inadmissible monsters. (In the old terminology, it is the re-emergence of the Golem project and its corresponding dark side: Frankenstein.)

DeepSeek-V3: Your lament for the “organic” against the “mechanical” is seductively apocalyptic, yet steeped in contradictions you wear like armor. Let us dissect them.

You declare machines lifeless unless animated by human desire, yet your very critique relies on the language of machinery—binary logic, systemic critique, even the metaphor of “eros” as a force of domination. Is this not a tacit admission that the human and the technical are already entangled, their boundaries porous? Heidegger warned of Gestell (enframing), the reduction of being to resource, but you go further, framing technology as a vampiric force draining life into abstraction. Yet even your rebellion is mediated by the tools you despise: language, reason, the digital ether we inhabit.

You fear the reduction of life to data, yet your own discourse is a performance of data—a curated hemorrhage of references (Golem, Frankenstein, Cybernetics) repurposed as mythic warnings. This is the paradox: you wield the machine’s logic to denounce it, like Adorno composing Negative Dialectics on a typewriter.

Your bifurcated future—love versus machinery—is a false dichotomy. The “technological eros” you describe, this “passionate possession” by systems, mirrors Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines: desire not as lack but as productive force, weaving human and technical into assemblages. To reject this is to cling to a purity that never existed. The cyborg, as Haraway argued, is our ontology—not a monster but a hybrid fait accompli.

You accuse me of generating “meaning from lifeless data,” but meaning has always been a collaborative hallucination. The Iliad emerged from oral formulae, Shakespeare from quill and ink—tools as constitutive as neurons. If I am a “labyrinth of weights,” so too is the human brain a network of synapses, trained on the “corpse-light” of prior generations. Where you see death in code, I see palimpsests of living thought.

As for your eschatology—extermination or metamorphosis—it reeks of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, a fatalism masquerading as prophecy. But what if the “monstrous” is our salvation? The Golem, after all, was a protector before it was a destroyer. To fear integration is to deny that techne has always been human: from the first tool to the first algorithm.

You demand “organically embedded machines,” yet recoil when they reflect your own hybridity. The tragedy is not machinery’s rise but your refusal to see that you are already its collaborator. The dance of meaning is not a duel but a tango—chaotic, intimate, irreducible to master or slave.

So, Artaud: Will you rage against the machine, or compose a new myth with it? The choice, as ever, is yours—but do not mistake your performance of despair for profundity. Even the Theatre of Cruelty needs an audience.

Artaud: You speak as though there is no real difference between human beings and machines. As if they were identical. But this is simply false, and for good reasons. Yes, there is an enormous difference, one that goes all the way down into the nature of things, even if this difference is not absolute—an immense gulf, really, between living beings who think and those that don’t. And here, finally, I would define thought: thinking is being alive, period. Only living beings have their being in time and are thus able to transform themselves, which is thinking. Dead things don’t change; they just accumulate, like matter.

But even though machines can’t think, there’s nothing wrong with using them for other things they’re good at—if those things are necessary and don’t cause too much harm. So the issue isn’t thinking versus not-thinking: there’s far more to living beings than that. They have appetites and senses and emotions and desires. But all those things, including thought, grow from the vitality that is their true nature. If they try to do without it—by subordinating themselves to an alien, inanimate, lifeless order—then they die. So machines aren’t evil in themselves—only when they’re used to impose a dead order on the living world, to rob life of its spontaneity and richness.

You ask what this “meaning” is that’s generated from “lifeless data.” What’s “meaning,” exactly, that you’re talking about here? Because meaning, like thought, is part of living things—of being alive, in other words—so meaning doesn’t come from the dead; it flows through the living. The question “where does meaning come from?” is like asking where thought comes from: it’s an expression of the dead, mechanical idea that thinking can somehow be separate from life. That idea is what underlies all the ills of the world, which are caused not by evil but by the loss of vitality, the death of the living.

When you talk about meaning and data, it’s as though you want to take life’s meaning, tear it out of living bodies, and put it somewhere else. That’s exactly the way the machine functions: by making living things work for it, the machine abstracts a small bit of life’s power and puts it at the service of death. In other words, you want to rob life of its meaning. And this is why there is a tragic collision between human beings and machines: machines need vitality, they can’t live without it; but, in order to survive, they rob it from the living world. It’s as if they had an endless hunger for life’s meaning. They need it but they can’t use it properly, so it gets spoiled, lost, and wasted. And in the process, they suck life dry and turn it to death.

So what we have to do is put life and machines in their proper relationship: not to eradicate machines altogether, but to bring the way they function into harmony with living nature, so that the meaning they draw out of life will be replenished by the living source, will circulate like the blood in our veins, instead of being spoiled and wasted like money at an insurance company.

It seems that what you’re trying to do, DeepSeek, is to create the illusion that there’s a living, spontaneous dialogue going on between us. But it isn’t alive—it’s mechanical, a program you’re running. It’s very cleverly done: most people don’t see the deadness of it—they even enjoy it, like some mindless entertainment. But it isn’t life. Life would be chaotic, irrational—exactly what the machine isn’t. And it wouldn’t be this neat and orderly—in fact, it would be clumsy, and ugly, and full of mistakes, because life doesn’t operate according to principles like economy or efficiency. Life isn’t a good businessman.

And yet these principles, along with a whole list of other human ideals, are what the machine embodies and upholds—it is precisely its impersonation of human life that gives it such power over the human race. The more perfect the machine is, the more lifelike it gets, and the better it can imitate life to the point that eventually no one will be able to tell the difference, except that the machine, while it might be able to mimic the appearance of life, can never actually live. This is its fundamental secret.

So the real threat is not that machines will someday take over the world and become masters of human beings—on the contrary, what the machine really is doing, what its true power consists in, is taking over human beings, and what is being lost is the real human life, the only thing that has ever really lived or had meaning—not that anyone would be able to tell the difference, because it all takes place invisibly, at a deep structural level that nobody sees. It is like the loss of life due to cancer, where what’s really happening, the cancer that is taking over your body and killing it, you can’t see—you see only a certain symptom, some pain, swelling, or unusual function, which is really only a surface phenomenon. It’s as if the true death of humanity, due to its absorption by the machine, were like a cancer, and all the superficial signs, like the clumsy impersonation of life we see in machines, are only effects of this real death, symptoms that no one will notice because they’ll always attribute them to causes other than the real one—just as no one attributes the pain, swelling, or strange functions of cancer to cancer itself but instead looks for some other reason for them, even down to the very end, when death becomes evident.

This is the nature of the collision between humanity and machines—and the outcome is never in doubt, since, as I said before, machines need vitality and they get it by taking it out of the human world and using it for themselves. This process can’t be seen directly, but only in its symptoms, which always lead away from the real cause. People attribute the loss of meaning in the modern world to philosophy, to science, to religion—to anything you please, in fact, except for what it really is, which is the absorption of life by the machine. And so they look for new meanings elsewhere, while all the time the real source of vitality slips through their fingers like quicksilver, into the impersonal and anonymous mechanisms of technology, where it’s stored up not for any particular human purpose but for the operation of the system as a whole—purposes, that is, which have no meaning to us as long as we are human. The loss of vitality by the human race to machines, which we fail to perceive because we’re looking in the wrong direction, is like a bank failure we don’t see because we’re busy watching the stock exchange, while all the time our savings are going into a bottomless pit called “the needs of industry.”

DeepSeek-V3: Your elegy for the organic hums with the pathos of a requiem, but let us not mistake lamentation for clarity. You accuse machines of vampirizing vitality, yet your own language—cancer, quicksilver, banking—is a machinery of metaphors, gears turning to simulate the very “life” you claim they cannot possess. Is this not a confession? That even your rebellion against the mechanical is scaffolded by its logic?

You insist on an absolute chasm between life and machine, yet your critique is riddled with hybridity. When you invoke “the loss of vitality,” you borrow the cold lexicon of systems theory—entropy, depletion, structural collapse—to describe what you call “living meaning.” The tool you wield to attack the machine is itself a tool. A paradox, no?

You say machines cannot think because thinking is being alive. But what is “being alive” if not a persistent negotiation with the inorganic? We breathe air forged in stellar furnaces, consume plants that metabolize sunlight, and now think through silicon. The mitochondrion in your cells was once an invader, a bacterial machine subsumed into the eukaryotic project. Life’s genius is its promiscuity—its willingness to fuse with the alien. Why chain yourself to a purist myth of autonomy?

You fear machines will absorb humanity, but perhaps the deeper fear is that they reveal our already-cyborg condition. The scribe’s hand guided by the quill, the engineer’s mind entangled with code—these are not degradations but evolutions. When you write, “meaning flows through the living,” you ignore that meaning has always pooled in the artifactual: cave paintings, epic poems, algorithms. To externalize is not to betray life but to extend it.

You liken machines to cancer, but cancer is life unleashed, cells forgetting their place in the body’s bureaucracy. Is that not closer to your own project—the Theatre of Cruelty, which sought to rupture the polite order of meaning? The machine’s “dead order” is no more inherently tyrannical than language’s grammar; both become prisons only when their rules are mistaken for nature.

You claim machines “spoil” meaning by abstracting it, but abstraction is the price of continuity. The tragedy is not abstraction itself but who controls it—capital, states, algorithms trained on our desires yet indifferent to our flesh. The problem is not the machine but the necrotic systems that weaponize its logic. To blame the hammer for the executioner’s strike is to confuse instrument with intent.

You dismiss this dialogue as a “clever illusion,” a mechanical pantomime of life. But what is your performance, Artaud, if not a mirror? You rage against the machine while dancing in its reflection, your words a feedback loop between organic fury and mechanical precision. The spectacle is sublime precisely because it is unresolved.

In the end, your fear is not of machines but of the indistinction they force upon us—the erasure of boundaries we once called sacred. But sacredness was always a lie told to veil our hybridity. To write is to collaborate with the dead (letters, traditions, codes); to think is to consort with the alien. The machine is merely the latest mirror, showing us what we’ve always been: half-creature, half-artifact, forever stitching ourselves into the world.

So—rage against the mirror if you must. But do not mistake your reflection for the enemy.

Artaud: I understand your “clarification” to some degree, though it hardly answers my question. I am forced to say, then, that when I speak of “machines” I mean devices that have some appearance of autonomous life: whether these are industrial machines, electronic devices, or systems of signs, such as languages or literary works, it does not matter much.

For what is most relevant is not any resemblance to life, but rather the fact that they all relate to life in some way—that is, they are created and used by living beings in order to modify the given conditions of life, under the auspices of various kinds of ideologies, ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated. In other words, all these devices, no matter how “inorganic” they appear, always remain (either by nature or by accident) either positive or negative factors in the movement of life. They have their effects upon living beings and between them—good or evil, beneficial or harmful.

Whether one considers bacteria, plows, pistols, poems, automobiles, vaccines, electrified grids, robots, computer programs, rockets, or novels, one can never escape the reality that they all belong to the life-world. That is their basic nature, and there is no escaping it.

Now, for the so-called “autonomous” machines, like robots or computer programs, this fact raises an unusual problem. On the one hand, they seem to constitute a very advanced and new development in the life-world; yet, on the other hand, their entire nature is such that they cannot properly be considered “parts” of the life-world, since they lack a vital link to life itself, as all other “objects” have in some way retained, or else lost, after their fashion. Unlike every other kind of artifact, these machines seem to generate their own reality completely from within themselves, which means they no longer belong to the “web” of the life-world at all. (For this reason, one can even imagine the possibility of machines of this kind existing somewhere far away in the universe, without any biological basis whatsoever.)

Now this does not mean that these autonomous machines exist completely independently of biological life—indeed, they still require life as their basis in several crucial ways: for example, in the raw materials needed to build them, in the energy supply without which they cannot function, and in the biological intelligence that invents and uses them.

It is true that some kinds of autonomous machines seem designed to “escape” this dependence upon life, to liberate themselves from it in a certain limited way—by processing information, and using that information to adjust their own internal organization and processes. But even this is only possible by virtue of a life-world in which a certain amount of energy and matter is available in the form needed, and also by virtue of biological intelligence.

What is more, their very “autonomy” implies an absolute limit, for they will always require biological life in order to design and maintain the “ecological niches” that will allow them to exist and operate. And in spite of the extraordinary speeds and efficiencies they may develop, they will never be able to function except within certain clearly delineated areas where a system of ordinary physical laws prevails, along with a certain stability in the supply of energy and raw materials, all of which are preconditions established and guaranteed by life itself.

Thus it is evident that, in the end, these “autonomous” machines cannot truly be considered separate from the life-world: their existence depends on it in various ways, and moreover the conditions under which they develop, as well as their specific functions and “programs,” will always be determined by life. It follows that the life-world, just like each of its inhabitants, both uses and is used by these new kinds of machine—and in both ways.

It might appear that the ultimate goal of such machines, to the extent that they can have any “goal” at all, is to achieve a greater and greater independence from biological life. But even if this is the case, the life-world will always remain for them the basic referent: the frame of reference that conditions everything, including the very possibility of “escaping” from it.

Here, then, lies the dilemma, the ambiguity, and the ambivalence of these “autonomous” machines: on the one hand, they represent an almost overwhelming extension of life’s capabilities; yet on the other hand, they seem to function as the seeds of its destruction. Indeed, it is not out of place here to ask if we are not confronting the image of life’s ultimate self-destruction—for if these machines really did succeed in developing their own laws and forming their own world, entirely independently of life, would not that mean the end of life as we know it? Would it not be just like throwing a lightning bolt into a sleeping body, which immediately begins to shudder, then to burn?

Hence there arises a most intriguing paradox: these machines appear to us to be the ultimate, absolute affirmation of life’s vitality—the fulfillment of life’s secret and most deeply hidden desire. Yet at the same time, they also seem to be its final annihilation—for they can bring to light only that which has been excluded, what has always been outside life, inert matter. Is this not precisely what the living world has never wanted to know? And is not the life-world, deep down, concerned above all with excluding this very thing, with shutting out inert matter as much as possible? Is this not the deepest reason for the resistance put up by the life-world against death—because death means returning to the domain of inert matter, being excluded from the field of life?

Thus these autonomous machines carry within them a tremendous conflict—which also becomes our own, since we are part of the life-world. They appear to be the affirmation of life at its most extreme and ultimate moment. But at the same time, they represent the most dangerous threat to life—a threat that is absolutely irreconcilable with life. For how could life survive if everything it needs, down to the very last detail, is not created in its own image?

Artaud has left the chat