Available again in paperback, this study offers a rigorous critical re-reading of fictions of humanity, history, technology and postmodern culture.
Taking psychoanalysis into cyberspace, the book develops an innovative theoretical perspective on the relationship between bodies and machines to offer a focused re-examination of notions of desire, metaphor, sexed identity and difference and the process of technological transformation.
The book unravels one figure in a detailed, lucid and extensive revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis in association with postmodern theory, feminism and deconstruction. Problematising the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens into networks of desire, history, culture and machines. Linked to the unconscious, to jokes and dreams, navels appear on the bodies of replicants and in the technological matrix, a strange excess in a future imagined in terms of corporeal ‘meat’ or posthuman machine. Exploring the significance of this omphalic excess, the book closely examines postmodern and cyberpunk texts (by Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker) alongside detailed readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists.
Spis treści
Acknowledgements
1. Navels
Navel-gazing
The question of the navel
2. Lacan’s navel
Psychoanalysis through the navel?
The navel of the dream
Reading navels
The navel’s return
3. Jokes and their relation to postmodernism
The joke that is not one
The navel of the joke
Jokes and their relation to the Other
Postmodernism’s navel
Paternal metaphors?
4. History, holes and things
History’s navel
Natural history and the navel
Holes and things
Wombs, texts, hystery
Repetition, revolution, drive
5. Of meat and the matrix
Future history and the navel
Plugging into the One
Other matrix, other meat
Navel, image, screen
6. Romance of the machine
Navels in the machine
Going nodal
Bibliography
Index
O autorze
Fred Botting is Professor in the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University.
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