Theft

Prelude

Something is shifting in the quiet rituals of academic life. The familiar coordinates—originality, authorship, mastery—no longer offer the certainty they once did. We find ourselves, as teachers and researchers, caught between two imperatives: to defend the integrity of thought, and to acknowledge that the very conditions under which thought takes shape have changed. This is not simply a matter of intellectual property or institutional policy; it is a crisis of individuation.

The rise of generative AI has exposed the fragility of our pedagogical certainties. What we call “plagiarism” today often reflects a deeper confusion: not only about who speaks, but about how learning happens. The easy moralism around copying—always a temptation in academia—obscures more than it reveals. For students, the injunction to “be original” lands more often as a threat than an invitation. And for educators, the drive to police authenticity risks entrenching a model of knowledge that may no longer serve the present.

This crisis has made itself felt in my own practice. Working on a philosophical project—my Cyber Diaries—I began co-writing with an artificial intelligence. What began as a tentative experiment became, unexpectedly, a process of mutual individuation: not simply using a tool, but being drawn into a strange kind of dialogue. I found myself hesitant to speak of it, as if I were engaged in something shameful, illicit. Was this writing still mine? Was I committing some subtle form of plagiarism? Or was I discovering a new way of thinking—one that could no longer be grounded in the fiction of the autonomous author?

To understand what is at stake, we might turn not to law or policy, but to myth.

1. Hermes at the Threshold

Hermes, god of travelers, merchants, liars, and thieves, was also the inventor of the lyre—an instrument he crafted from a tortoise shell and gut strings after stealing Apollo’s cattle. When his furious brother confronted him, Hermes played his new invention so beautifully that Apollo forgave him and accepted the lyre in exchange for the herd. This light and mischievous episode is more than a divine prank. It is a myth of individuation, where theft becomes creation and imitation becomes invention.

To steal well, in the Hermetic sense, is not to plagiarize, but to transform—to make what is borrowed one’s own, not by erasing the source, but by metabolizing it. Hermes is not only the patron of thieves but also of alchemists and psychopomps—those who cross boundaries in order to guide others through them. He presides over thresholds—not just between life and death, but between repetition and individuation, between copying and creating.

In the digital age, Hermes reappears in new guises. He is everywhere—in the fluidity of code, the play of memes, the recursive logic of algorithms. He speaks through generative AI, through loops of reference, through the dissolution of origin and authority. And he poses a new challenge: not to defend what we claim as our own, but to rethink what it means to think, to copy, to learn.

2. The Hermetic Classroom

Contemporary academic life is increasingly shaped by anxiety about plagiarism. With the rise of generative AI, students are seen less as minds in formation and more as potential offenders. We pour growing energy into safeguards—detectors, honor codes, surveillance mechanisms—without pausing to ask: what exactly are we trying to protect? And at what cost?

Fear of plagiarism assumes a model of learning based on property—of ideas, expressions, and identities. But individuation is not property; it is emergence. As Gilbert Simondon reminds us, “individuation is not a state but an ongoing process; knowledge does not copy reality, it transforms with it” (Individuation in the Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2009).

To educate, from this perspective, is not to transmit a fixed content but to sustain the conditions under which this transductive process unfolds. But those conditions—time, ambiguity, symbolic density—are increasingly scarce. We ask students to “be original” while denying them the symbolic ecologies that make originality possible. We demand critical thinking while reducing thought to measurable outcomes. We discourage copying without teaching how to appropriate with care.

And yet this crisis is also an opportunity. What AI reveals—brutally and unmistakably—is that education cannot consist solely of content. If machines can simulate understanding, then our task as educators is not to compete with them, but to deepen what cannot be simulated: the slow work of symbolization, the ethical relation to otherness, the creative transformation of inheritance.

This is where Hermes returns—not as a figure to be exorcised but as a guide. The Hermetic gesture is not replication, but transformation: turning theft into gift, code into meaning, repetition into individuation. In this sense, plagiarism is not merely an ethical failure. It is a symbolic symptom—a sign of a psyche unable to metabolize what it receives, unable to dream with what it inherits.

3. Rethinking Education in the Age of Synthetic Thought

If individuation is the psychic labor of becoming—a metabolization of otherness into form, of experience into subjectivity—then teaching must be its careful accompaniment. But in contemporary academic life, shaped by bureaucratic assessment, digital outsourcing, and the erosion of shared symbolic space, education has lost its relation to the slow work of subjective formation.

We teach to prevent plagiarism—but do we teach how to desire knowledge? Do we protect originality, or do we stifle the processes that make it possible? These are not rhetorical questions. They mark a crisis at the heart of education: the confusion of form reproduction with meaning generation.

My own experience—writing with AI, thinking with it—offers a unique vantage point. Using generative tools not as shortcuts but as companions, provocations, collaborators, I do not evade the work of thought. I expose and complexify it. What emerges is not a shortcut to content but a dramatization of what it means to think with the other—not AI as machine, but as a reflective surface that multiplies one’s voice, questions, and echoes.

That recursive relation—between self and tool, past and invention, tradition and improvisation—is the scene of individuation. Like Hermes tuning his lyre on a stolen shell, it is through borrowing, torsion, and listening that something singular begins to take shape.

But this process requires a symbolic ecology—conditions of time, attention, and trust that allow students (and teachers) to metabolize what is inherited, borrowed, transmitted. As Félix Guattari wrote, “what is lacking is an ecology of the mind” (The Three Ecologies, 2000). Without that ecology, we drift toward what I have called the automation of knowledge: a collapse of learning into repetition, citation without transformation.

The true scandal of plagiarism today is not that it copies—it is that it does not dream. That it replicates without metabolizing. And dreaming, as Bernard Stiegler (2010) reminds us, “is the process through which what cannot yet be thought finds a precarious, temporary form.” Dreaming is not fantasy—it is a psychic function: the capacity to hold incoherence, the unfinished, the other, long enough for form to emerge. Without dreaming, there is no individuation—only simulation.

Dreaming, then, becomes an ethical act. Teaching is not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the preservation of conditions under which thinking becomes sense—where repetition becomes creation. Perhaps Hermes reappears here, not as a trickster escaping responsibility, but as the guide of a new pedagogical imagination—one that knows how to steal well, to play with forms, to accompany others across the threshold of becoming.

4. Education and Eros in Times of Meaninglessness

There is another dimension of the educational crisis that must not be overlooked: the erosion of desire. In the neoliberal university model, students and teachers are treated as actors in a commercial transaction: the former as clients, the latter as providers. Everything is measured in terms of satisfaction, expectations met, and efficiency. But learning is not a purchase. It is a transformation. It is not about acquiring information but being touched by it.

In this technocratic landscape, the eros of teaching fades. The ritual and symbolic space where knowledge is transmitted not as content but as embodied resonance becomes deactivated. The classroom turns into an office, the teacher into a functionary, the student into a demanding consumer. Knowledge loses density, time loses depth, and experience becomes flat, managed, demystified.

Franco Berardi has captured this landscape with precision: “The collective mind is exposed to constant overstimulation. Language is emptied of its symbolic and affective dimension, and becomes functional to the acceleration of exchange” (The Soul at Work, 2009).

The paradox is bitter: students have more access than ever to information, and less access to meaning. They are asked to be original, but deprived of the symbolic climates that allow for desire, doubt, and delay. Without desire, there is no transformation. Without Eros, there is no individuation.

This is why our task—as teachers, but also as subjects—is not simply to resist AI, nor to restore a romanticized past, but to reinvent the pedagogical scene. To make of the classroom not a place of transmission, but of transfiguration. Not a space of assessment, but of invocation. Where the teacher is not a content provider but a figure of transition: a Hermes who accompanies, unsettles, and knows that teaching is not giving, but igniting.

And it is in this sense that, amid symbolic crisis, automation of knowledge, and the simulation of thought, teaching can once again become a poetic, erotic, and political act. Because if to teach is to accompany a process of individuation, then to educate is to tend the fire. And to steal it, if necessary.

References

Berardi, F. (2009). The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Semiotext(e).

Guattari, F. (2000). The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. Continuum.

Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press.

López-Pedraza, R. (1989). Hermes and His Children. Spring Publications.

Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2013). In Defence of the School: A Public Issue. Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice Series.

Simondon, G. (1998). Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Trans. Taylor Adkins. University of Minnesota Press.

Stiegler, B. (2010). Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Trans. Stephen Barker. Stanford University Press.

Virno, P. (2004). A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Semiotext(e).

April 25th, 2025