Sex, machines and navels Fiction, fantasy and history in the future present [Paperback]

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. Problematising the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens into 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. Exploring the significance of this omphalic excess, the book closely postmodern and cyberpunk texts (by Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker) alongside detailed readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists.

Presenting an informative and original exploration of cultural fantasies and anxieties, Sex, machines and navels will appeal to teachers, researchers and advanced students in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

1. Navels

Navel-gazing

The question of the navel

2. Lacan's navel

Psychoanalysis through the navel?

The navel of the dream

Reading navels

The navel's return

3. Jokes and their relation to postmodernism

The joke that is not one

The navel of the joke

Jokes and their relation to the Other

Postmodernism's navel

Paternal metaphors?

4. History, holes and things

History's navel

Natural history and the navel

Holes and things

Wombs, textsl3.