There is No Language for AI to Speak: A Meditation on Language, Faith, and our Dogmatic AI

Rhizomes 41 (2026)
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Abstract

This five-part essay explores the fundamental instability of language and its implications for artificial intelligence. The author argues that language inherently “pretends” to represent reality while simultaneously “portending” alternative meanings, creating an inescapable condition of doubt and interpretive multiplicity. Drawing on thinkers like Lacan, Kierkegaard, Tanabe, and Derrida, the author contends that dogmatic attempts to fix meaning—whether religious, political, or technological—inevitably generate their own contradictions and rebellions. The essay then positions AI as a contemporary secular substitution for divine authority, functioning as “God the Fodder” that promises to secure truth and eliminate doubt while remaining fundamentally trapped within language’s duplicitous nature. The author ultimately suggests that we will and must doubt AI, since only faith, as an embodied silence, can navigate the paradoxes of existence.

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2026-02-17

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David R Gruber
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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References found in this work

A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia.Gilles Deleuze - 1987 - London: Athlone Press. Edited by Félix Guattari.
The animal that therefore I am.Jacques Derrida - 2008 - New York: Fordham University Press. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet.
Bergsonism.Gilles Deleuze - 1990 - New York: Zone Books.

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