Love and Other Technologies : Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age / Dominic Pettman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pettman, Dominic, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Can love really be considered another form of technology? Dominic Pettman says it can—although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the "human" in the information age. Using the writings of such important thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler as a springboard, Pettman explores the "techtonic" movements of contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the language of eros. Highly ritualized expressions of desire—love, in other words—always reveal an era's attitude toward what it means to exist as a self among others. For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone's identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply and mesh together. Wresting the idea of love from the arthritic hands of Romanticism, Pettman demonstrates the ways in which this dynamic assemblage—"the stirrings of the soul"—have always been a matter of tools, devices, prosthetics, and media. Love is, after all, something we make. And, love, this book argues, is not eternal, but external.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1. Love and Other Technologies

2. The Storable Future and the Stored Past

3. In the Artificial Gardens of Eden-Olympia

4. Facing the Interface

5. ‘‘How Was It For Me?’’ Not-Seeing the Non-Spaces of Pornography

6. A Self of One’s Own?

7. Mind the Gap

8. Asymptotic Encounters: Love Freed from Itself

Conclusion: Of Mice and Multitudes

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Mrz 2022)

ISBN:

0-8232-9210-X

OCLC:

1350687883