Alien object, infinite extraction, or the artificial intelligences of Reza Negarestani and Luciana Parisi

Abstract

This article offers a comparative investigation of the philosophical projects of Reza Negarestani and Luciana Parisi regarding artificial intelligence, analyzing their ontological, political, and cosmotechnical implications in the contemporary context of cognitive machines. Drawing on Yuk Hui’s diagnosis of technodiversity and data colonialism, the article argues that artificial intelligences must be understood not as neutral technical artifacts, but as expressions of divergent cosmologies competing to shape the world. In Negarestani’s case, the paper reconstructs his speculative rationalism, which conceives intelligence as the capacity to participate in normatively governed inferential practices, grounded in a Hegelian view of the artificialization of spirit. Artificial intelligence, under this model, becomes a vector for rational self-legislation and normative convergence. In contrast, Parisi offers an aesthetic and algorithmic account of intelligence, grounded in incomputability, recursion, and fracture. Her theory emphasizes the constitution of technical subjects that resist equivalence and operate against colonialist recursion. The article incorporates Elzahra Osman’s critique of Negarestani’s rational universalism and connects Parisi’s approach to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s critique of transparency. Ultimately, it argues that the dispute between normativity and indeterminacy, between reason and fracture, defines not only the fate of artificial intelligence, but also the political and ontological horizons of contemporary technicity.