Pope

In this course

The pope appears here primarily as a historical reference point for institutional authority and symbolic power rather than as a direct theorist of AI or cybernetics. The mention seems to invoke papal governance structures as an analogy for hierarchical systems of control, possibly in Tiqqun's critique of how subjects are produced and managed under capital—though this fragment is too partial to determine the exact argumentative weight. Without fuller context from these excerpts, it's difficult to assess whether the pope functions as a legitimizing historical precedent, a cautionary model of institutional capture, or merely an incidental comparison.

Background

The pope is the bishop of Rome and the head of the worldwide Catholic Church. He is also known as the supreme pontiff, Roman pontiff, or sovereign pontiff. From the 8th century until 1870, the pope was the sovereign or head of state of the Papal States, and since 1929 of the much smaller Vatican City State. From a Catholic viewpoint, the primacy of the bishop of Rome is largely derived from his role as the apostolic successor to Saint Peter, to whom primacy was conferred by Jesus, who gave Peter the Keys of Heaven and the powers of "binding and loosing", naming him as the "rock" upon which the Church would be built. The current pope is Leo XIV, who was elected on 8 May 2025 on the second day of the 2025 papal conclave.

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