Invitation to ZOË
July 26–28 / The Meritage, Napa Valley
There is a conference in Napa this July called ZOË. Not BIOS: ZOË.
The distinction is older than the Christian writers who then took it up: ζωή names life in its fullest sense, βίος the managed arc of livelihood. The conference is named after the first: a question my work in theory, design, and poetry has circled for decades.
The coming essays on this Substack hinge on the difference between production and rendering. To produce is to hold under constraint; to render is to set the surface such holding would have produced, without it. The regime that these essays describe is one in which rendering has become both endemic and systemic, and production residue rather than rule. In this context, what counts as a life—alive, alove—let alone a good one? What is allowed and foreclosed by abundance? The questions cease to be rhetorical the moment want itself can be inmachinated.
ZOË gathers exactly around that pressure point, bringing Athens, Jerusalem, and the Valley into the same building.
Luke Burgis has spent a decade retooling Girard’s mimetic theory for the social-media era. His panel with Toby Kurth and Rebecca Lowe takes up desire and agency in the age of AI. Essay #02 of In the Expanded Field argued that LLMs are best read as desire engines, with behaviour emerging from shaped appetite rather than rule-following. If so, the mimetic loop is no longer a relation between two desiring subjects and a third. There is now a fourth term—even, as I suggest, a fifth wall—the Girardian diagnosis must account for.
Then there is the panel called “What Is It Like to Be Alive?” with Tao Lin, Victoria Trumbull, Jordan Castro. Trumbull’s first book, On the Memory of the Soul: Augustine and Bergson’s Metaphysics, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury this autumn. Castro is a novelist and Cluny’s deputy director. Lin needs no introduction. The framing—perception, memory, literature, the texture of conscious experience—sits squarely between my own poetic practice and my work on AI dramaturgy. To ask what it is like to be alive in 2026 is already a question the rendering regime has reshaped, because rendering changes the texture of experience as much as the structure of the world.
The most interesting decision the organisers have made is to put Bryan Johnson at the front of the room. Johnson is, by his own description, against death, but in a manner that revives Klossowski’s living currency under digital conditions: flesh as $$$$$, continuously marked to market. His project is βίος in the starkest sense, and ZOË names the other thing. If the conference is honest with itself, it will have to make the distinction explicit; whether it does so is the open question.
Three days, 26–28 July, at the Meritage in Napa. Luke has shared a discount code for readers of this Substack: PSYCHE, 30% off. I intend to attend.
Bosch, Hieronymus. The Garden of Earthly Delights (closed triptych; exterior panels), c. 1490–1510. Oil on oak panels; 220 × 195 cm (closed). Madrid: Museo del Prado.