Sex, Machines and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present FROM THE PUBLISHER
Sex, Machines and Navels 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. Problematizing the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens onto 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. 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.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
Botting's credentials are not stated, but he's obviously an academic with an interest in a quirky topic: the literary, cultural, and psychological trappings of what we commonly know as bellybuttons. This is a book perhaps best described in the author's own words: "The first section introduces psychoanalysis through the navel, not only in the way the metaphor is explicitly employed but in terms of its general implications for psychoanalytic interpretation and Lacan's famous `return to Freud.'....the second section interrogates postmodernist fiction and theories of postmodernity from the position of the navel of the joke, that is, in terms of the play of language and difference....The third section looks back on history from the knotty position afforded by contemporary theory and fiction....The last section addresses navels of the future through the fictions and theories promoting or denigrating the technological phenomenon of cyberspace." Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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