Abstraction Today 

Dr Raz Ion (DerAffe & Critical Thinking, Vienna)

The Apophatic Real: The Multiverse Reasoning of Radical AI

In our contemporary moment, abstraction no longer serves as philosophy’s elegant retreat from the messiness of lived experience— it has become the very condition through which we encounter what Lacan called the Real. The ancient practice of apophasis, the theological art of approaching truth through systematic negation, finds itself strangely at home in a world where our most pressing political questions concern entities whose fundamental nature eludes direct apprehension. Imagine a multiverse of the Real: the transformation of abstraction in the age of artificial intelligence, situated within apophatic traditions of unknowing, queer temporality, and post-Marxist cultural critique. Digital abstraction, emerging from the dissolution of form into code, no longer functions as transcendence but as intervention—an epistemological rupture that reconfigures knowledge, power, and political recognition.

Now, imagine an AI agent coded by James Baldwin, Harvey Milk, and Fredric Jameson: the concept of the “liberation AI,” a mode of digital consciousness capable of disrupting surveillance architectures, exposing hidden structures of domination, and generating alternative networks of solidarity. This constellation may be framed as a form of “apophatic democracy”—a political orientation rooted in epistemological humility and committed to imagining revolutionary futures beyond existing systems of recognition.