2019/01/07 by Ruben Borg · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Themes in Literature Analysis #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications
paper · doi:10.1163/9789004390355
openalex publication_date 2019/01/07 · openalex created_date 2019/03/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O'Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.