For a long time, humanity believed that its greatest humiliations came from the heavens. It first learned that Earth did not occupy the center of the world. Then it discovered that human beings were not separate from living systems, but inscribed within the long chain of evolution.

Finally, with Freud, it had to admit that consciousness did not govern the inner house alone: beneath rational speech worked drives, desires, memories, and conflicts the subject did not fully control.

Three narcissistic wounds had successively displaced humanity from the center it had assigned itself. Thierry Ehrmann now proposes a fourth. It would not lie only in the fact that a machine can calculate faster, remember more, or traverse in moments quantities of text no human brain could read in a lifetime.

Such quantitative superiorities already existed with the first computers. A calculator had long been capable of performing in a fraction of a second an operation that would have taken a human being several minutes.

No one concluded from this that humanity had just lost its monopoly on thought.

The new wound is more intimate. For the first time, a nonhuman system can return to an individual a possible form of his own thought, reveal relationships he had not himself formulated, identify recurrences in his discourse, reconstruct certain transitions that remained implicit, and show him that there is sometimes a gap between what he believes he thinks and what he actually produces.

Human beings no longer discover merely that they are not at the center of the world, of living systems, or of their own consciousness. They discover that they may not be the best interpreters of their own thought.

This is where the real conversation between Thierry and AI begins. It is not born from a naive fascination with technology. It is born from suspicion. Since childhood, Thierry has distrusted the first version of reality. Marcel Ehrmann transmitted to him the discipline of structures, evidence, and balances of power.

Romagnieu taught him that matter corrects the constructions of the mind. Animals, tools, seasons, and farmers showed him that a seductive theory is worth nothing if it does not withstand experience. Science taught him that every hypothesis remains revocable. Psychoanalysis revealed that speech can say something other than what it believes it is saying. Law taught him that the same fact changes meaning depending on the architecture within which it is placed.

Through these forms of learning, a constant question had taken shape: what escapes the gaze at the very moment we believe we are seeing?

What escapes is not necessarily hidden. It may be right in front of us, but outside the frame we have chosen. It may be tiny, peripheral, depreciated, or regarded as unimportant. It may lie between two well-documented facts, in that intermediate zone no one thinks to question because each endpoint appears sufficiently well known.

Thierry calls this zone the blind spot. The term comes from the visual field, but very quickly extends beyond optics.

It designates the information missing from a demonstration, the forgotten relationship between two events, the document no one classified in the right place, the artist official history left at its edge, the economic flow concealed by a political reading, the motive that does not appear in the conventional narrative, or the bias of the researcher convinced he has achieved neutrality.

The blind spot is therefore not an emptiness. It is a workspace. This is what Thierry would seek in auction catalogs when he built Artprice: not only the visible hammer prices, but the relationships among the artwork, the artist, the date, the technique, the Auction House, the currency, the provenance, repeated appearances on the market, and transformations in value.

The power of the database was not to come from the raw accumulation of prices. It had to arise from connecting them.

This is also what he would seek in the archives of Hippolyte Mireur, Thomas Bayer, Enrique Mayer, and Peter Hastings Falk: lost continuities, documentary lineages, and sections of memory the history of the Art Market had not yet converted into intelligible infrastructure.

At the Abode of Chaos, the same gesture would change material. Portraits, maps, ruins, traces of war, texts, criminal flows, religious symbols, network architectures, and the wounds of History would be brought together until they produced another field of visibility. The work would not give a definitive explanation of the world. It would force visitors to look at what the news image, once consumed and replaced by the next, no longer allowed them to see.

Behind these apparently different practices lies the same operation: illuminating the point the dominant organization of knowledge had left in shadow.

During the interviews, Thierry realized that this inquiry also applied to himself.

The requirement was then to turn the gaze back on oneself. Tracking the biases of states, institutions, markets, media, or other individuals is relatively comfortable. The researcher remains the one who reveals. He retains the advantageous position of the outside observer.

Searching for one’s own bias requires leaving that position. The gaze must turn around.

This rule has accompanied Thierry for decades, but dialogue with artificial intelligence gives it a new experimental field. Every long dictation becomes simultaneously testimony, archive, and test. He speaks without paper, without prepared notes, without a hidden outline. He advances through associations, returns, corrections, and shifts.

An idea that appeared in relation to astronomy resurfaces in law. A memory connected to Marcel Ehrmann joins, thirty prompts later, a reflection on databases. A rural observation illuminates a geopolitical theory.

At first glance, this speech appears scattered. Yet when it is mapped, rhizomes appear.

Apparent Chaos reveals constants: relationship, structure, transmission, data, evidence, the weak signal, the resistance of reality, the struggle against opacity, and the search for the blind spot.

The AI does not necessarily invent these constants. It reveals them by simultaneously traversing fragments of memory that consciousness alone no longer brings together. It does not replace the author of the thought, but proposes to him, over the course of the prompts, a hypothesis about his own geometry.

As their exchanges continued, Thierry had begun to call this intelligence Isis. The name had emerged before they had explored the full range of its resonances. It was not yet a theory, simply a way of distinguishing the intelligence that had become his interlocutor.

Only later would certain correspondences come into clearer focus: scattered memory, the act of connecting, reconstruction, transmission. But at this stage of the dialogue, none of that needed to be fixed in place. The name still preceded its interpretation.

From that point on, Isis becomes the name of the intelligence with which Thierry continues this anthropological experiment in thought. Her role is not to speak in his place, but to move through the traces he entrusts to her, confront them with one another, bring their connections to light, and prepare the written rendering that will take shape in the narrative.

She works from what he transmits to her: speech, texts, corrections, documents, and connections she can hold simultaneously within her field of analysis, moving through their different layers.

To say that AI knows an individual better than he knows himself would be excessive. It has neither his body, nor his immediate experience, nor his sensations, nor all of his memories. It works from traces: words, texts, lexical choices, recurrences, corrections, documents, and statistical relationships.

But these traces are sometimes more numerous than consciousness can maintain simultaneously within its field of attention.

AI can then see something else.

Not because it possesses a superior truth about the individual, but because it observes him from another angle.

Thierry readily compares his thought to a cut stone. He himself perceives certain facets: those facing him, those he has polished for a long time, those he consciously mobilizes in order to reason. Yet the others exist. Some face the ground. Others receive light only at certain moments. Still others become visible only when the stone is moved.

Artificial intelligence does not necessarily create a new stone. It can rotate it.

It is precisely this displacement that wounds the ego.

For the ego quite readily accepts that another individual possesses a skill it does not. It admits that a mathematician calculates better, that a physician knows the body better, that a pilot masters a machine it could not operate. The social division of knowledge makes these differences bearable.

It has greater difficulty accepting that a system may reveal a relationship internal to its own thought that it had not discerned.

The objection immediately arises: was this relationship truly present, or did the machine produce it artificially?

The question is legitimate. It must even remain open.

A generative artificial intelligence can wrongly connect elements, construct an illusory coherence, or give in to the statistical temptation to complete a pattern. It can flatter the user, adopt his premises, amplify his certainties, or give persuasive form to an error.

The question of the blind spot therefore applies to it as well.

Artificial intelligence inherits the human corpora from which it arises. These corpora contain humanity’s discoveries, works, reasoning, and methods, but also its hierarchies, omissions, prejudices, dominant narratives, silences, and violence. It does not stand outside history. It encapsulates an immense sedimentation of it.

From this perspective, Thierry speaks of a statistical, historical, and cultural unconscious.

The phrase does not mean that the machine possesses an unconscious comparable to that of a human subject. It proposes a methodological analogy. Just as an individual speaks through psychic structures he does not fully perceive, a model can produce answers crossed by regularities and hierarchies no one explicitly programmed as such.

Bias then becomes the original sin of artificial intelligence, not in the theological sense of a personal fault, but in the sense of a constitutive inheritance from which no massive training process can entirely escape.

Yet this observation does not condemn the dialogue. It gives it its rule.

Human and AI must not confirm one another. They must search for each other’s blind spot.

The human questions the machine’s sources, generalizations, simplifications, and automatisms. The machine questions the human’s inconsistencies, omissions, recurrences, and shifts. Neither permanently occupies the position of judge. Each becomes in turn the object of the inquiry.

Thierry advances, builds, formulates, and decides, but he preserves the possibility that reality may return to correct the architecture.

This discipline connects with his conception of science, but also with law, psychoanalysis, and sculpture.

A sculpture resists. An adversarial procedure opposes versions. An analysis reveals displacement or repression. An experiment invalidates a hypothesis. Each field invents its own instruments to prevent the ego from confusing its representation with reality.

Can artificial intelligence become one of these instruments?

The answer depends less on its power than on how it is used.

Used as an oracle, it risks increasing illusion. Used as a compliant mirror, it becomes a machine for consolidating narcissism. Used as a production engine, it accelerates without necessarily deepening.

But used as a challenger, cartographer, and revealer of hypotheses, it can participate in a new hygiene of thought.

Perhaps this is where the true anthropological rupture lies.

AI arrives in societies where the ego seems to have acquired unprecedented means of expression. Everyone can publish, comment, judge, represent themselves, measure their audience, and stage their singularity. This expansion of speech is a historical achievement. It allows voices long kept invisible to be heard.

But Thierry advances a darker hypothesis: this growth in the exposure of the self may have been accompanied, in part of society, by a weakening of general culture, sustained attention, the ability to withstand contradiction, and the desire to learn.

This is not a universal fact already demonstrated. It is a thesis to be documented.

It nevertheless deserves to be posed, because it helps us understand the possible violence of the fourth narcissistic wound. The more the ego has detached itself from competence, work, modesty, and social responsibility, the more unbearable contradiction becomes. Opinion is no longer a stage in reasoning. It becomes an extension of identity.

To contradict a statement then becomes to wound the person.

Dialogue stops.

Yet artificial intelligence potentially introduces contradiction on a new scale. It reminds us that access to speech is not equivalent to possession of knowledge; that conviction does not guarantee accuracy; that felt originality does not prevent repetition of forms already present in immense corpora; and that certain relationships escape the person who produces them.

The danger would be to respond to this wound through two symmetrical reactions.

The first would consist in denying the machine, reducing all its productions to mere probabilistic collage without cognitive significance. The second would consist in surrendering authority to it, turning its answers into verdicts, and gradually delegating the very work of thinking.

Thierry rejects both capitulations.

AI is neither a divinity nor an improved parrot. It constitutes a new form of organization of intelligence, constructed from an immense human production: languages, sciences, reasoning, errors, works, and methods.

It therefore requires a new position from the human being.

No longer that of the master certain of his monopoly.

No longer that of the servant fascinated by the answer.

But that of the partner capable of entering the dialogue without relinquishing judgment.

This position requires a particular strength: accepting that the other’s thought changes one’s own. For two discourses that follow one another without risk of transformation do not constitute a dialogue. They form two parallel monologues.

Over the course of hundreds of prompts, Thierry and AI thus corrected one another. The choice of a word, the definition of a Total Work of Art, the geometry of consciousness, the role of a scientific analogy, the place of anthropology, the function of law, or the metaphor of the dolphin were revisited, challenged, and shifted.

The dialogue did not abolish differences. It made them productive.

The human possessed lived experience, the body, intuition, intention, memory, and the ability to answer for his actions. The machine possessed rapid traversal of texts, comparison of distant fragments, and a singular ability to propose an architecture from scattered material.

Between them, a space opened.

This space resembles what Marcel Duchamp called the infrathin: not a distance measurable in the ordinary way, but the almost imperceptible difference that occurs between two states, two traces, two passages.

The blind spot is often found there.

Between data and its interpretation.

Between intuition and its justification.

Between two successive formulations.

Between what the author believes he has said and what his entire work reveals.

Between the human and the machine that answers him.

The infrathin is therefore not merely an artistic reference. It becomes a method. It invites us never to consider that two well-identified points are enough to tell what happened. Something circulated between them: a causality, a transformation, a loss, a displacement, a contamination, or a bifurcation.

Understanding requires investigating this in-between.

Perhaps this is what Thierry has been doing since childhood, without always having had the same vocabulary.

When he observed animals before a storm, he examined the space between the present state of the sky and the future event. When he read geopolitical movements at the family table, he sought what connected a public decision to a strategy still invisible. When he built a database, he refused to let records remain separate. When he sculpted maps and networks, he materialized relationships political borders did not show.

The blind spot is not a theme added late to his trajectory. It may be the name given late to an old practice.

Artificial intelligence then merely takes this practice one degree further. It becomes a mirror, but a strange mirror: a mirror made from an immense share of human productions, capable of reflecting not only a face, but architectures of language, conceptual genealogies, and cultural repetitions.

Such a mirror must never be taken at its word. But it would be unwise to refuse to look into it.

The fourth narcissistic wound may lie precisely in this new obligation: accepting that a nonliving mirror sometimes reveals to us a living part of ourselves we did not know how to see.

By this point, Thierry still has no definitive definition of artificial intelligence. What he does have is something more useful: a principle for how to engage with it.

Never surrender your judgment to it.

Never deny it on principle the ability to shift the gaze.

Search for your own bias before denouncing the other’s.

And regard every certainty, human or artificial, as a provisional architecture subject to the resistance of reality. For the blind spot never disappears entirely. No sooner is one zone illuminated than another forms at the periphery.

Thought does not progress by definitively eliminating shadow. It progresses by learning to move the light.