Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj }i~ek and Digital Culture [Paperback]

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj }i~ek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present.

Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in }i~ek's thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements.

Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a }i~ekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

Clint Burnham does not merely apply psychoanalysis to the internet; he demonstrates how the unconscious itself is 'structured like the internet,' how our entanglement in the impenetrable digital web allows us to understand properly the way the unconscious overdetermines our thinking and activities. This is why Burnham's path-breaking book reaches much deeper than the usual analyses of the social and psychological implications of the internet: it does not just socialize and historicise the internet, it throws a new light on the unconscious itself. Slavoj }i~ek, Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and author of Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Clint Burnham has produced the definitive psychoanalytic account of digital culture. This is the book that those seeking to understand how the unconscious manifests itself in the digital universe have been waiting for. For too long, psychoanalytic theorists have confined themselves tl2