Artificial Intelligence: A Power Without a Subject Version 2
March 17 and 26, 2026 An essay on its legal limits and its responsibility Introduction Artificial intelligence is now omnipresent in public discourse, invoked in turn as a technological promise, an economic lever, or an existential threat. Yet behind the abundance of commentary and uses, a more fundamental difficulty remains: we still do not know exactly what we are in the process of introducing into our legal, economic, and political systems. For artificial intelligence is not simply an additional technical innovation. It breaks with an implicit structure that, until now, has organized all our frameworks of thought: every intelligence was, in one way or another, attached to a subject. Every decision, every action, every production of meaning could ultimately be attributed to an identifiable will. With artificial intelligence, that relation dissociates. We are now confronted with a form of operational intelligence capable of producing results, influencing de...