Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite

By Ruben Borg

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, B la 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9004390340
• ISBN13: 9789004390348
• Release Date: January 2019
• Publisher: Brill
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.4"