Lisa Siraganian

Tool or Colleague? The Case against Personhood for AI

February 25, 2026

Should AI have legal rights? Arguments defending ePersonhood—legal personhood for AI, LLMs, and supposedly autonomous robots—have appeared recently and are taken seriously. Siraganian examines what exactly this could mean, showing how ePersonhood erroneously adapts arguments from corporate personhood and rights for nature. Considering the claims of philosophers, legal thinkers, AI theorists, and Google engineers, as well as the production of social robots like “Sophia” and “Ai-Da,” Siraganian argues that the current deceptive language of AI is really a symptom of the tremendous, still unbridgeable gap between human life and our AI reality.

Corporate Communiqué: The Derrida-Holmes Merger

February 14, 2024

I want to argue that Derrida’s provocative invocation of a corporation reveals certain premises that deconstruction shares with the corporate legal form, and that both mistakenly assume—in their theorizing—that intentions are causes. More specifically, Derrida’s picture of communication was already, for late-nineteenth-century legal theorists, their problem of corporate intention. How should people understand what is happening when they negotiate with vast collective social agents whose intentions seem unreliable or unknowable?

Against Theory, now with bots! On the Persistent Fallacy of Intentionless Speech

August 2, 2021

Arguing for the First Amendment rights of computer content, recent legal scholars Ronald Collins and David Skover have adapted Reader Response literary criticism from the 1970s, as well as related debates about literary meaning from the 1980s, to develop the idea of “intentionless free speech.” This essay examines and challenges these ideas. To think that intention can be meaningfully severed from free speech is to fundamentally misunderstand both speech and language. Siraganian situates and contextualizes this legal scholarly development in relation to both literary theory (Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Fish, Toril Moi) and legal theory (Leslie Kendrick).

Art and Surrogate Personhood

July 17, 2017

Whereas, on Fried’s account, such theatricality and coercion by objects is a scenario to avoid, both 2001 film and novel presume the inevitability of spectacle and objecthood. They embrace the theatrical condition of their 1968-modernity as their 2001-future. It might even be the case that Kubrick was attempting to turn the entirety of his film into the experience of a minimalist object in a manner entirely congruent with Fried’s account.

Don’t Let Me Be Universal: Or, the Postwar American Poem

June 22, 2015

She explains that much liver damage is drug-induced because the liver functions as a chemical purifier, stripping the blood of toxins by splitting poisons into less destructive chemical building blocks. The resulting toxins are excreted while the cleansed blood recirculates. When an overwhelmed liver fails to break down the blood’s contaminants (even beneficial ones, such as painkillers), the pollutants poison the liver cells instead.

A House Divided: American Art since 1955

July 24, 2012

What is the individual’s ongoing relation–how does she belong–to the national culture she may serve or criticize, but which has also helped shape her life and thought? This is the question embodied by Jasper Johns’s Flag. It has never been more relevant than in the new millennium–a political moment that is the backdrop to the themes of this book.