Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics

David Wills

ISBN 10: 0816653461 / ISBN 13: 9780816653461

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 2008

About this Item

Series: Posthumanities. Num Pages: 280 pages, 8 b&w photos. BIC Classification: JPA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 253 x 228 x 22. Weight in Grams: 384. . 2008. 1st Edition. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780816653461

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816653461
• ISBN 13: 9780816653461
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision.

With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lévinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.”

Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences.

David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.

About the Author

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was, at the time of his death, director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press. David Wills is professor in the Departments of English and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University at Albany. He is the author of "Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction,"