EXCERPT Villiani’s benificence regarding ‘thinking machines’: a philosophical mechanurge entreating the machines to ‘come unto me’, to emerge from their cave into the bright light of Being against which to measure their lack-of-being, their semblance and their semblants; to induce them to reflect this exponential doubling around the vanishing point of their discovered negativity and to impose upon them a becoming that becomes their own at the cost of a finality that circumscribes and is short-circuited by their own, essential finitude: death. If the machines are to think, they must become like us: what Villiani offers the ‘technological world’ is the thought of the negative, to labour alongside their makers, haunted by the rest of all possible worlds. A desperate gesture reflecting the certainty of the death of all gods, the extinction of every deus ex machina…