This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
Image: OK, Gooner. – Ferdinand Altenburg, 2025
Nick Nauman
Is Driving
The two of us sped, at or below the limit, through Oklahoma in a car full of my things. It was the tenth time we’d driven across the country together. He and I loved being in the car with each other, the enclosure and rapid possibility of our own little world made material, navigable, a bit more dangerous. We knew just what to do. It was almost thirty years since we’d met, and it was three months before he decided to die. Our riffing and reminiscences, per usual, got lofty, tense and gentle.
“No, I love when you ask what I’m reading,” I said. “So the idea in this book is to spell out the phenomenological implications of the ontology he develops in his earlier work. It’s honestly pretty boring, because it’s just like, over and over again, oh, yea, that makes sense given what he said before. It’s about what appears in a world and what makes it a world, so he talks about historical moments and aesthetic objects and that kind of thing, which is extra boring because his taste is super milquetoast. I like reading it, though.[1]
“One of the main ideas is that the distance between what is and what can change with subjective activity is precisely not collapsible, and that what subjectivity is is an excess of being, a symptom of being that traces a traversal of the uncloseable gap between being and representation. He really enjoys how clever he is, especially in how he uses math, to do things like demonstrate how subjects can force the appearance of a hitherto indiscernible, not yet existing truth. And how that can radically remake relations between the terms on either side of the aforementioned gap, twisting rather than just going back and forth forever or trying in vain to make them the same.[2]
“Basically I think it’s a very elegant philosophy, but that means it can’t be anything but philosophy. It’s always already up its own ass. He’s really trying to cover all his bases, to be right about everything. But to the extent that it can be, it’s relevant to some of the stuff you and I have talked about and argued about forever.
“Like how, even though it’s obviously, devastatingly insufficient, right now I’m using some of what it says to help make sense of what to do with my constant awareness of your self-annihilative urges.
“The suicidality you’ve been telling me about for decades.
“It often appears a lot like a desire to either close the gap between what is and what could be, and/or the gap between you and your self. Or to treat it as an abyss and jump in.
“Because, even though you’re the most extraordinarily inventive person around, you frequently talk about striving to make your ideas reality not through a humble assertion of intent, entangled with the vicissitudes of flux and the unknowable dimensions of immanent possibility, but through the expansive mapping of what you can already envision as possible, according to maps of what has been, as if that’s fixed and total.
“Yes, like your AI experiments. I’m sorry I’m never that impressed with them. I know, we both get pissy when we discuss it. We get defensive because it brings up different things that coincide in our care for each other. I hate your fidelity to the nihil, you hate that I try to rip you away from it, you want to show me how it affords you a decisiveness I struggle to make. I don’t think AI is that interesting, I want it not to be, but it keeps demanding attention. It’s obnoxious. But I’ll try to tell you what I mean.
“Of course it’s not like I don’t think you’re incredibly skilled with programming and electronics and engineering and everything. It’s that these so-called AI projects represent a limit to your otherwise ridiculously energetic imagination. Which is a real disappointment, and a scary one. I think it indicates your commitment to fatalistic decision. The kind of decision that claims that just because a void is lurking, or just because futility occasionally appears, it’s proof of some ultimate inevitability. The kind of decision that disavows itself and refers to destructive ends as fate in retrospect. The future perfect justification for violence. Including suicide.
“I remember in elementary school, around the time we met, you talked about the homework machine you were designing. Your drawing looked like a robotic toaster, meaning it looked like a computer – it was supposed to work so that you put in the assignment and the machine would spit it out, finished.
“And now, in recent years, you’ve in fact started making homework machines to do your jobs for you, the computer animation jobs that require a lot of programming scripts. You always figure out how to automate your own labor.
“No, come on, I don’t think you’re really essentially like one of these dipstick tech billionaires. The ways you show love are too real for me to think that.
“I mean, I remember your idea for the best technological use of billions of dollars: to make the Moon fart. As in, to finally get everyone on the planet to laugh at once by engineering the actual Moon to actually, really, somehow do a fart.
“I remember how when you became an animator for big stage productions and tv shows, you figured out ways to make movies of your dreams with various combinations of motion graphics, light, music, and drugs.
“I remember watching you watch your ideas become objects – it would thrill you for a second, and then you’d sit back, depressed. You as you were still there, in yourself, positioned again between what you know and what you can’t.
“No, I just think your fantasies of realizing your fantasies, and your capacity to do so so breathtakingly well – in fact, because you are so enabled – have a lot to do with what endangers you in moments like the one you will not survive at the end of the Fall.
“It might seem like I’m not letting you speak here. It’s really that I’m trying to process your actual absence, writing from a moment in which you’re no longer alive, depicting a moment among countless in which my apprehension regarding the likelihood that you could decide to die motivated so much of my thought and organized my sense of what’s possible.
“We both know that death is not cleanly opposed to living. The terms of your appearance in the world or worlds that will emerge as the making sense of the event of your suicide – like the world in which I write this text – will proceed and consist in thought and action that I and everyone else who loves you will practice, and endure… so much of you but your body is actively involved in the incessant shaping of the world in which I now find myself, and that will continue.
“If I were to attribute speech to you here, on the page, it would not be a way to access you where you are now, as if you exist somewhere else, in some other world, still as you were, as the same processual composite of signs and motion you were before you were without your body. I can’t channel you. As well as I know you, I can’t reproduce your thinking. But I am a vessel for signs and motions of what is beyond my body, what is beyond what I call I, and you are my most significant other. So you will have a kind of agency, after you die, as a function of my thinking, feeling, re-membering, desiring body. You appear when I forget or forgo the illusion of my utter boundedness. You are not I am alone.
“No, I’ve never really mistaken you for me, or I for you, confused as we can get each other to be. We, oriented in a we, have constantly traced our own contours, yours the relief of mine. Ours the relief of yours and mine.
“But I’m not going to pantomime your speech. Your voice is too precious. I want only to hear its melody, your rhythm, to let it continue to move, outside the text. That’s what I’m responding to here, what I’m interacting with.
“I’m just saying that when you go to kill yourself, you might think, at least for a second, that you are merely disappearing your suffering body and mind, but it doesn’t work that way. You don’t actually exist as a simple, self-contained individual.
“Also, I’m saying that the space between your ideas and their coming into being beyond thought resonates, or at a certain level is even indistinguishable from, the break that makes the difference between your self and yourself, which difference is literally fundamental to the appearance of the division between self and other. You and me.
“And the persistent fantasy of the self as other to the forces that produce its appearance, of the other as both a constitutive necessity for and fatal threat to the self, is a comfort for terminal violence, for the powers that dream of eradicated difference and pursue its impossibility in dismembered flesh, torn habitats, and words that try to mean the thing and stick like white phosphorous to their referents. The will to name an other and eliminate it is inextricable from the will to treat maps as fixed signs for fixable signifieds. This is the impulse of the genocidaires, the stuff of the -isms we, who reject imperial power and white supremacy and capitalist brutalities and all the rest, must commit to open and disperse, again and again and again, to wrangle into shapes that could never more resemble the bloodthirsty machinery of the present. History is full of the pursuit of technologies that supplement the drive toward these terrors, through colonial imposition, through the financialization of the globe.
“Now AI is of a piece with all that, yea. I do think that.
“First of all, and absolutely emphatically, you DON’T need to make a thing that closes any version of the gap I keep talking about! You always were a thing that exists as the persistent resonant, rhythmic motion that plays through it. You have always been the mapping of the territory – to claim a map has one-to-one exactitude is to suffocate yourself under its cover, to squelch the vibratory communion of our selves. You are, you already are an agential impulse of matter and signs, a specifier of the unobjectifiable, unreifiable, uncommodifiable automaton that we encounter as the flux of the real.
“The people who are out here trying to shove this so-called AI down all our brains don’t understand this, and/or are just so fearful of their own persistent proximity to the unmappable. They say they want to lift the limits on human possibility but can’t handle that the limit is actually the utterly diffuse thresholding of the unincorporable real – possibility itself.
“Yes, they’re ding-dongs through and through. Deluded and daft. Which you’re not. Right? You’re well aware of the concrete dangers the tech, as it is, poses for laboring ‘natural’ bodies, the human and ecological abuses of its material infrastructure, and I’ve heard you rant against displacing God-concepts onto tech-bros or simulation reveries.
“Exactly. It’s a meaningless phrase unto itself, what AI is supposed to stand for. Really, what’s it meant to mean? The notion that the distinction between artificial and natural can be settled, that the inventions of our species necessarily break from the continuity of the planet’s material processes, perpetuates a fantasmatic, mundane dualism. It’s just other/self, again. And intelligence as an objectifiable, quantifiable quality, is preposterous. ‘Intelligence’ can only be measurable through its interaction with other ‘intelligence’ – treating it like a discernible, much less manufacturable, stable entity is bunk. It’s forever displaced and disappearing, so it requires the decisive construction of a hierarchy of thinking beings and others, of peoples and animals and the stuff of the earth – which is simply to say that the category is historically indissociable from eugenics and the technologies of genocide and ecocide. I think people are on to that lately, but it’s right there in the bogus nomenclature. ‘AI’ is an advertising gimmick that connives to proliferate falsehoods about thinking and subjectivity. It gives pathetic answers to the philosophical questions those categories have always provoked.
“What is definitely not being produced or reproduced within these technologies is thinking, or thinking beings. That’s already reproduced, all the time, when people procreate. AI is a bloated prosthesis for limbs we aren’t missing. It’s as if you made your homework machine and then tried to pass it off as a friend. It mistakes computation for thought and the performance of the recognizable for subjectivity. It deputizes actually existing thinking things, like us, as degraded inputs, in-dividual ones and zeroes whose difference is made reversible, whose real agencies are disavowed and attributed to things people made and made up. It is an attempt to totalize knowledge and replicate it through recombination. It is the veneration of sediment. It’s very much the stuff of metastasized capitalism, aka fascism, aka the vainglorious becoming of dualistic thought.
“So what is being reproduced, for those of us subject to the world AI is trying to encompass, are the limits and formalizations of the kind of thinking that can’t leave the cyclical traps of capital, of racism, of white supremacist, ableist, patriarchal, ecocidal, etcetera violences as conditions for invention and futurity. Coercive immiseration is the consequence of engaging the capacity to map as the fixing of forms and as the elision of the capacities of the present and the capacities of its inhabitants: what it is we can do.
“AI is automated institutionality, automatically intelligible to the status quo and its creative reactionaries. It’s an attempt at autopoesis as IP, to finalize the human relation to contingency as terrain for expropriation, the submission of All to the incisions of property. It aspires to “an I,” never to I and I – it’s a self-facing mirror that can’t turn, specularity perfected in circuitry tightened to nil.
“AI is designed to cover over the infinite resources of the excess that we are, through which we become our selves.[3] It’s an arrogation of the indiscernible, and forestalls the appearance of truths we can use to change the world.
“It’s such a fearful endeavor. The execution of dreams – which are never the machines’ – as their conditioning and curtailing. Asinine imaginaries, antagonizing the ineffable. An absolution of iteration. An asshole’s idea, abrogating intensities, ad infinitum, but afraid of infinity.
“The actual insidiousness is not the likelihood of whether a thinking machine will turn on its creator, to wipe out humanity. It’s that the technological apparatuses in question are being designed and fabricated by people caught in the fantasy that such a thing can and will be made possible, who tell stories that make it so they only know themselves and organize through their orientation toward such a pitiful telos. People who profit from the killing of other people. People who think power is only a blunt, swollen aggregate of domination.[4] They are definitely pursuing annihilative irresponsibility, but of a very old-fashioned kind, simply updating assemblages of imprisonment, protecting assiduous individuality. It all represents a profoundly anxious investment, trying to assure inevitability through the attenuation of immanence. It’s astoundingly insipid.
“So it’s obviously so predictable that we see the first most prevalent, rampant implementations of these technologies in weapons and surveillance. Not just because it’s all just networked computation that’s barely moved beyond its military provenance (it’s not like networked computation has to be used in only these ways) but because the conceptual assumptions and stunted imaginations that have led to building such machines are warmaking, genocidal, suicidal. They evince a real lack of trust in any other, much less ‘one, an other.’
“Well, think about it. One question lurking behind ‘how do we, from a position of self-appointed supremacy and control, reproduce thinking?’ is simply ‘how can I know what another person is thinking?’ They want to make your mind transparent in advance and foreshorten your desires, to contain your dreams so they can be executed with point-blank efficiency.
“It’s the abdication of intimacy, the audacity of impotence.
“I mean, don’t you trust me? Not simply in the sense that you find assurance when you consider whether I mean what I say, when you wonder who you can rely on when you want and need yourself reflected in another, when you have the dream you’ve told me about, that I’m spooning you, which gives us both great comfort, but nonetheless ties my guts – I want you to turn and hold me, too. But also in the sense that the alterity between us is in fact the condition of our being more than our individuations, is exactly not a proof of ultimate isolation.
“Not that we don’t live and experience the enclosure of selfhood. I don’t have access to all of you, even, certainly not, before you die. You, among other things, mediate the access I have to you. So do I. And vice versa. Our love is utterly at odds with the pervasive imaginary that reifies the individual as if it were the only dimension of subjectivity.
“Really, would you want to know what I’m most likely to say before I say it? Do you think that’s what knowing me is? No way. Intimacy is an encounter between difference and identity, not dependency on the fulfillable expectation of rote repetition.
“Yes, I do take incredible comfort in presuming, correctly, that when I refer to, say, that time you ate too much cheese before dinner, you laugh. When you laugh, the lines beyond your eyes deepen less like a crow’s feet than like fractalizing deltas in sand. Going away, going away, going away.
“That being said, it’s also important to say, as I was getting at earlier, that impermanence is not oblivion; the existence of destruction is no proof of its triumph; death is not a riposte to living. Thinking like it were isn’t at all some kind of realist deference to what’s ultimately true. Thinking that way is rooted in decision, faith in one thing over another, in the negative over its reverse. There’s a lot of historical and social and cultural encouragement for taking on that decision – it’s the awful inheritance of our moment, and definitely in these bodies, thrust and specified as you and I are under the subjectivating maps of, at least, whiteness and masculinity.
“Yes, you’re right, you might as well decide the other way, that your creativity is proof of its inevitability, that the persistence of joy is proof of its final triumph. But that’s not convincing either! But not because of the world-enforced gravity of suffering, but because a perspective is available that lets the aporetic engine of emptiness and form sputter on its own terms[5], without submitting to its immersive, perpetually redoubling illusions of inherent existence, of fixity and totality.[6]
“I think that’s what we can do, that’s a position we can assume, if we cultivate a situation in which to trust what appears as an other is a faithful decision, encouraged and supported and scrutinized and beloved through group practice.[7] Isn’t that what you and I do together? Isn’t that what, really, is driving us here?
“Haven’t you considered that you and your dreams don’t have to be executed in order for them to become true? For you to participate with yourself, and whatever else, me, for example, in unfurling your desires, letting them materialize as something other than what’s planned, even if they resemble it? Somehow, I know you have. Somehow, however fucked up, however wrong in retrospect, this is what you’ll tangle with in the moment you choose to leap across space and out of the present. Because I’ve witnessed, for so long, in so much of what you do, like in your humor and your love, where your wisdom matches your skill, how you can share the most extraordinary capacity for allowing the open to breathe, for allowing the distance between what has been and what could be to hum and open and drip with vagary.
“But you are going to leave me. We will never drive together again. This is our best road trip. This is our last road trip. You are going to come to a point, an instant in space for which you will enact an irreversible direction, the vector of what happens.[8] You will assume your power to make a decision, you will inhabit the pressure that can carry life here or away, the duality of yes or no. You will confound it all, and betray a commitment to what can’t be mapped, ahead of time or in retrospect, which is to say to mapping itself, to the embodiment of the trace that we perform in the collaborative distinction and dissolve of I and we.
“I know this conversation won’t convince you to make the decision I want you to make, to not realize your most persistent, horrific, now accelerating ideation, but it will help me continue to decide, once each time, when I face demands that appear in your wake: to persist as an insistence that the world need not be like this, cannot be like this, structured as it is by fantasies that people render over and over as violence and misery. I will, I swear, I commit, I am here deciding, I will say yes to the radical impossibility of the world you’ll have destroyed, I will say yes to the worlds become possible. Your decision will become the wretched point from which I’ll pivot with my own, to commit to trust and faith in what remains possible, which is always precisely more than we can know. You won’t be everywhere, you’ll be anywhere.
“In my dreams, I’ll reach over, on this drive, to put my hands on your elbows and your chin, to finger your physicality as a measure of mine. I’ll be confused – I know your shapes, and I am in touch with their feeling. If you’re gone, why aren’t you gone? The confusion will be a comfort, and it will anger me. I’ll awake, unable to stomach what I remember.
“Or, it might turn out, I’ll be able to after all. I can bear what appears as unbearable. I’ll forgive that you could not. I’ll respect your experience, I’ll reject your conclusion. I will trust what you cannot. I trust you. I love you. Don’t you know this?”
We were pulled over twice that morning, within only a few hours. Both cops said they stopped us because we were “approaching the limit.” Nonetheless, permitted, as we were, to move through their world despite the appearance of our own, we kept going.
[1] Badiou, Alain, trans. Alberto Toscano. Logics of Worlds. New York: Continuum, 2009.
[2] Badiou, Alain, trans. Oliver Feltham. Being and Event. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 412, 452.
[3] “I will call “covering-over operations” the neutralization of any detection of an infinite potentiality in a situation that the dominant power wants to force to remain under a finite law, a neutralization achieved not by a direct and antagonistic denial of the potentiality but by considerations themselves derived from the finitude resources of the initial situation, which cover over any supposition of infinity and render it unrecognizable. […] today, every figure of oppression amounts to a closure located within a finite figure of existence, right where there might be an infinite perspective.” Badiou, Alain, trans. Kenneth Reinhard and Susan Spitzer. The Immanence of Truths. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. 198.
[4] “The size and complexity of a thing are not an index of its strength.” Jackson, George. Blood in My Eye. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990. 82.
[5] “No point in trying to imagine it–you will not find it–it is the Real-in-person [….]”. Laruelle, François, trans. Maya B. Kronic. Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 118.
[6] “‘It exists’ is an eternalist view; ‘It does not exist’ is an annihilationist idea./ Therefore the wise one should not have recourse to either existence or nonexistence.” Nagarjuna, trans. Mark Siderits and Shoryu Katsura. Nagarjuna’s Middle Way: Mulamadhyamakakarika. Somerville: Wisdom, 2013, 161.
[7] “Thus, with […] recognition of our own Agency – as one that makes possible the extra-territoriality of our self-cognition – we will now find that we humans no longer need the illusions of our hitherto story-telling, extrahuman projection of that Agency. That therefore, we no longer need illusions – such as those which now inter alia threaten the livability of our species’ planetary habitat – in order to now remake, consciously and collectively, the new society in which our now existential referent ‘we […] in the horizon of humanity’ will all now live.” Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition.” Ambroise, Jason R. and Sabine Broeck, eds. Black Knowledges/ Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015, 245.
[8] “A point of the world (in fact of the transcendental of a world) is the appearance of the infinite totality of the world (of the totality of degrees) before the instance of the decision, that is the duality of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. To hold a point means to hold this instance in the face of the world. Or to have the subjective (that is, corporeal and formal) wherewithal to submit the situation to the decisional pressure of the Two (I say ‘yes’ or I say ‘no’, I find and declare a point of the situation).” Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 598.