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Dorsality Thinking Back through Technology and Politics David Wills |
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$67.50 cloth |
An ambitious investigation of what lurks behind our humanity and our technology. 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. “Wills engages in groundbreaking thinking in regards to human relations to technology. Although Wills sometimes writes with a Derridean interest—or should I say flair?—for tropes, he always clearly returns to issues of a present and political nature. For anyone writing or thinking about technology—especially the question of technology where continental philosophers are concerned—his articulation of technology as the rupture of the integral subject is especially insightful. As such, this is a must read for anyone who believes that their criticism, or art, has an affect on, or the ability to change today’s world.” —Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies 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. 280 pages | 8 b&w photos | 6 x 9 | 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1. The Dorsal Turn 2. Facades of the Other: Heidegger, Althusser, Levinas 3. No One Home: Homer, Joyce, Broch 4. A Line Drawn in the Ocean: Exodus, Freud, Rimbaud 5. Friendship in Torsion: Schmitt, Derrida 6. Revolutions in the Darkroom: Balázs, Benjamin, Sade 7. The Controversy of Dissidence: Nietzsche Notes |
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$22.50 paper