Alle Publikationen
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2017
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(2017): “Extimate” Technologies and Techno-Cultural Discontent. In: Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 21 (1), S. 24-54. DOI: 10.5840/techne20174560
Abstract: According to a chorus of authors, the human life-world is currently invaded by an avalanche of high-tech devices referred to as “emerging,” ”intimate,” or ”NBIC” technologies: a new type of contrivances or gadgets designed to optimize cognitive or sensory performance and / or to enable mood management. Rather than manipulating objects in the outside world, they are designed to influence human bodies and brains more directly, and on a molecular scale. In this paper, these devices will be framed as ‘extimate’ technologies (both intimate and external; both embedded and foreign; both life-enhancing and intrusive), a concept borrowed from Jacques Lacan. Although Lacan is not commonly regarded as a philosopher of technology, the dialectical relationship between human desire and technological artefacts runs as an important thread through his work. Moreover, he was remarkably prescient concerning the blending of life science and computer science, which is such a distinctive feature of the current techno-scientific turn. Building on a series of Lacanian concepts, my aim is to develop a psychoanalytical diagnostic of the technological present. Finally, I will indicate how such an analysis may inform our understanding of human life and embodiment as such.
2014
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(2014): The Machine That Therefore I Am. In: Philosophy & Rhetoric 47 (4). DOI: 10.5325/philrhet.47.4.0494
Abstract: This article follows Jacques Derrida, who follows the animal-machine. In his lecture The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida could easily have swapped “the animal” for “the machine” . In fact, throughout his readings of René Descartes, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas, the machine emerges right alongside the animal. In defining the limits of the human, these thinkers present the animal and the machine together in order to elevate the human. Unlike the human, who responds, the animal-machine merely reacts. The animal-machine may approximate certain human actions, but it can never, according to Descartes, in Derrida’s words, “respond to our questions” and will always suffer from a “lack ..
2008
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(2008): The Alienating Mirror. Toward a Hegelian Critique of Lacan on Ego-Formation. In: Human Studies 31 (2), S. 209-221. DOI: 10.1007/s10746-008-9083-z
Abstract: This article brings out certain philosophical difficulties in Lacan's account of the mirror stage, the initial moment of the subject's development. For Lacan, the "original organization of the forms of the ego" is "precipitated" in an infant's self-recognition in a mirror image; this event is explicitly prior to any social interactions. A Hegelian objection to the Lacanian account argues that social interaction and recognition of others by infants are necessary prerequisites for infants' capacity to recognize themselves in a mirror image. Thus mutual recognition with another, rather than self-recognition in a mirror, is what makes possible subsequent ego-formation and self-consciousness. This intersubjective critique suggests that many of the psychoanalytic consequences that Lacan derives from the mirror stage (e.g., alienation, narcissism, and aggressivity) may need to be rethought.
Keywords: alienation and recognition, Anerkennung, Anerkennung als menschliche Grundkategorie, Disziplin, Entfremdung, Favoriten, Lacan, Modelle/Theorien, Philosophie, (post)strukturalistische Ansätze, postmodern, Poststrukturalismus, Psychoanalyse, Psychologie, Soziale Angemessenheit, Sozialphilosophie, Theorie des Spiegelstadiums (Lacan)
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