Umbr(a): Technology - Softcover

Paul-Laurent Assoun; Levi R. Bryant; Russell Grigg; Bernard Stiegler; Graham Harman; Alain Badiou; Oxana Timofeeva & Lorenzo Chiesa; Marc De Kesel; Samo Tomsic

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0979953952 ISBN 13: 9780979953958

Publisher: The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, 2012

Synopsis

Psychoanalysis loves technology.

The truth of this statement is a reversal of the fundamental misunderstanding at the instant of the glance according to which psychoanalysis is ambivalent about -- if not implacably resistant to and expressly critical of -- the challenging claim (herausfordernden Anspruch) that, from cloud computing and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to additive manufacturing (AM) and the psychic apparatus, does not stop writing itself in modern technology. This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis loves all technology, much less everything that makes the human animal a Prothesengott, a "Prosthetic God" or "God with prostheses"; technology is irreducible to the imaginary extension of the bodily ego and its capacities or the symbolic autonomy of its detached pieces or spare parts (pièces détachées). Nor is it to suggest that this love is synonymous with the object of narcissism or the subject supposed to know that supports transference. In Totem and Taboo, Freud introduces the possibility of the invention of a "new weapon" in order to account for the murder of the father of the mythical primal horde in addition to the logic and temporality of ambivalence that, in the après-coup of the passage à l'acte, the sons -- qua the original partners in crime -- experience as hateloving (hainamoration). "They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires," "but they loved and admired him too," and this "fresh emotional attitude" is the subjective moment of a symptomatic partnership with technology that writes the logic of fantasy in the social body it retroactively constitutes. "One day," Freud explains, "the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength)." If psychoanalysis indeed loves technology it is insofar as it loves this undecidable but real invention, between being and having, to which the trace of such an equivocal new weapon bears witness in the moment of concluding the hateloving specific to the analytic experience.

About this title

About the Author

PAUL-LAURENT ASSOUN is a psychoanalyst and professor at the Université Paris Diderot in Paris, France. He is the founder of the Fédération de Recherches Sciences de la Ville and the director of Philosophie d aujourd hui, a collection of Presses Universitaires de France. He has written extensively on psychoanalysis and philosophy in numerous journals and edited collections.

ALAIN BADIOU is professor emeritus at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris VIII in Paris, France; a teacher at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland; and the former program director at the Collège International de Philosophie.

LEVI R. BRYANT is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in Frisco, Texas. He is the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008) and Democracy of Objects (MPublishing, 2011).

LORENZO CHIESA is a reader in Modern European Thought at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England and a founding member of the Materialism and Dialectic collective. He is the author of Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (The MIT Press, 2007).

MARC DE KESEL teaches philosophy at Artvelde University College in Gent, Belgium, and he is a researcher at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the KU Leuven in Belgium and the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He is the author of many books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, and religion, including Eros and Ethos: Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar VII (State University of New York Press, 2009) and Niets dan Liefde: Het vileine wonder van de gift (Sjibollet, 2012).

RUSSELL GRIGG teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. He is a practicing psychoanalyst, a member of the Ecole de la Cause freudienne, and a founding member of the Lacan Circle of Melbourne. He is the author of Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2008).

GRAHAM HARMAN is professor of philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He has published several monographs, including Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court, 2002) and The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2010).

BERNARD STIEGLER is a professorial fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London; the director of the department of cultural development at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, France; a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne; and the founder of the Ecole de Philosophie d Epineuil-le-Fleuriel in France and Ars Industrialis.

OXANA TIMOFEEVA is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia; an editor of New Literary Observer; and a member of What Is to Be Done? In addition to many articles on animality, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, she is the author of History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom (Jan van Eyck Academy, 2012).

SAMO TOMSIC is the Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Institute of German Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has published numerous articles on psychoanalysis, structuralism and contemporary French philosophy, and a volume on Lacan's final teaching, Druga ljubezen: Lacan in antifilozofija (Zalozba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 2010).

Edition details

• Publisher: The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0979953952
• ISBN 13: 9780979953958
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 186
• Editor: Joan Copjec, Joel Goldbach