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.
- ISBN10 0719055369
- ISBN13 9780719055362
- Publish Date 22 April 1999
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 25 March 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Manchester University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 256
- Language English