Anti-Electra
The Radical Totem of the Girl
Elisabeth von Samsonow
Translated by Anita Fricek and Stephen Zepke
The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra asserts that focusing on the escape of “the girl” from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art. It offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society.
Anti-Electra constitutes an occasionally uncanny and always fascinating work, which advocates a constellational, schizogamous relationality. This intellectually engaging and witty book will be of interest to art historians, scholars with interests in media studies, and those who are open to be challenged by an exciting feminist revaluation of ancient myths and their relation to the present.
Identities
The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra is a philosophy of “the girl” as a model of contemporary transgressive subjectivity. Elisabeth von Samsonow asserts that focusing on the girl’s escape from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art.
Presenting an interpretation of contemporary technics, Anti-Electra argues that technology today encompasses Electra’s gadgets and toys. According to von Samsonow, satellite drive technologies such as wireless telephones, WLAN, and GPS echo the “preoedipal constellation” that the girl specializes in. And with the help of the girl, the cartography of overlapping zones between humankind and animals, as well as between humankind and apparatuses, is redesigned through what the book holds as a “radical totemism.” Anti-Electra ultimately offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society.
$23.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0713-6
256 pages, 6 b&w photos, 5 x 8, May 2019
Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist, writer, curator, and professor of philosophical and historical anthropology at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Two of her books have been translated into English: Transplants and Epidemic Subjects—Radical Ontology.
Anti-Electra constitutes an occasionally uncanny and always fascinating work, which advocates a constellational, schizogamous relationality. This intellectually engaging and witty book will be of interest to art historians, scholars with interests in media studies, and those who are open to be challenged by an exciting feminist revaluation of ancient myths and their relation to the present.
Identities
Contents