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The Beginning of Symbolic Thought. AI art Introduction It is often assumed that AI models, unlike human beings, are severed from the real world. They deal only in symbols, without any access to perception, experience, or meaning. This view, however, rests on a questionable assumption: that humans themselves enjoy unmediated access to reality. Charles Sanders Peirce explicitly challenges this. In his words, “We think only in signs” (Peirce, CP 5.265). For both humans and machines, access to the world is always mediated through signs. The key difference lies not in whether signs are used, but in what kind and from where they are drawn. In this article, I argue that artificial intelligences participate in a sign-based process structurally analogous to that of human thought. Peirce’s theory offers a powerful framework to understand this. While machines operate on symbols produced by human reasoning—books, speeches, libraries—these are not devoid of meaning. They are, in fact, the cu...

The Debate. AI art. Photorealism Introduction The debate between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, held on April 19, 2019, at the Sony Centre in Toronto before more than 3,000 people (and millions of online viewers), was presented as a confrontation between capitalism and Marxism. However, one of the most contentious points was the supposed existence of a movement called postmodern neo-Marxism . Peterson argues that this trend represents a narrative continuation of Marxism within identity discourse; Žižek, on the other hand, denies any real connection to "pure" Marxism. This apparent dichotomy—Marxism versus postmodernism—reflects a reductive reading that overlooks their shared history. Thesis: Although often portrayed as irreconcilable opposites, Marxism and postmodern currents share a common genealogy. Many thinkers labeled as postmodernists emerged from the Marxist tradition and developed their critiques from within it. To deny this continuity, as Žižek does, is t...

Checkmate of Reason. AI art: symbolic expressioninsm Introduction The critique of reason as the gravitational center of Western culture has been developed through multiple genealogies. Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology , denounces "logocentrism": a structure of thought that privileges speech over writing, presence over absence, and origin over supplement. But long before Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche had already sketched a structural critique of the dominance of rationality in the history of art, particularly in The Birth of Tragedy . His diagnosis of Socrates as a symptom of cultural decline and his suspicion of reason as a tyranny disguised as truth anticipate, in different terms, a proto-deconstructive approach. This article explores how Nietzsche and Derrida disarticulate two analogous hierarchical inversions: that of reason over instinct, and that of speech over writing. Socrates as Symptom: Nietzsche's Diagnosis Nietzsche does not view Socrates as a model...