[Commlist] New book - Event Horizon: Sexuality, Politics, Online Culture, and the Limits of Capitalism

Event Horizon: Sexuality, Politics, Online Culture, and the Limits of 
Capitalism
Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen (Zer0 Books)

In an age where Silicon Valley continues to dictate what it means to 
innovate a painless future, knowledge and enjoyment are fertile breeding 
grounds of political contestation. But it’s not exactly democracy. 
Instead, we are controlled through tools and platforms that turn us into 
data for the profit of billionaires. Control has become so playful that 
we carry it in our pockets, as we continue to crave for likes and 
followers through expressing shared hatred towards the other in our cute 
little online circles. Because on the internet today, everything is 
cute: from selfie filters to gamified metrics on social media, from 
Tinder matches to racist memes on 4chan. Amidst all this cuteness, hate 
crimes continue to take more and more lives each day.
Through a psychoanalytic interrogation of the intersections of online 
culture, sexuality, and politics, Bonni Rambatan and Jacob Johanssen 
explore such horizons at the limits of capitalism. Combining a 
predominantly Lacanian approach with the thoughts of critical theorists 
such as Hiroki Azuma, Byung-Chul Han and Mari Matsuda, as well as the 
work of thinkers and poets Audre Lorde and Richard Siken, Event Horizon 
examines how capitalist ideology functions in our current moment—and, 
more importantly, how it breaks down.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Into the Digital Black Hole
1. Broken Circles, Infinite Loops
2. Networks and Psyches: Unleashed and Restrained
3. The Cute Subject
4. Heteropessimism and Digital Anesthesia
5. Playful Perversions: Narcissism and the Gamification of Control
6. Too Close, but not Close Enough: Politics and Sexuality in Times of 
the Alt-Right
Conclusion: Event Horizon

More information:
https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/event-horizon-sexuality-politics-culture

Reviews:
In Event Horizon, Rambatan and Johanssen combine Lacanian psychoanalysis 
and various critical theory approaches for the
analysis of how the mindset of the Alt-Right has shaped the contemporary 
internet. The resulting study is an excellent must-read
for everyone who wants to understand how the subject thinks and acts in 
contemporary digital capitalism.
Professor Christian Fuchs

Event Horizon calls to overcome the contemporary internet and networked 
AI in favour of a new erotic. Working within
the Lacanian tradition, the book pairs interpretation of classic sources 
with critical foresight on all matters digital. This theory
manifesto provides an alternative framework that relates memes, selfies 
and online dating to rising heteropessimism and fascism.
What should be the response when cuteness flips into violence?
The authors’ cautious motto: we are all part of the problem, but there 
are solutions. I’d say: vulnerable universality, bring it on!
Professor Geert Lovink

Event Horizon is a unique and most compellingly written book, composed – 
not unlike a piece of music – of a radical
dystopia and an equally radical utopia. The first part presents us with 
powerful and pitiless analysis of the predicaments of
our present social order, focusing particularly on how digital 
technology informs and shapes our lives and our social bonds
in all their multiple aspects. But then, in the last part, it does not 
simply turn against technology, but envisions its involvement
in a very different kind of social tie. Sexuality and its ‘beyond’, or 
transformation, are put at the center of this transformative
revolution, which we are invited to imagine as the only Real on our 
horizon, with ‘love or death’ as our only choice.
Professor Alenka Zupanči

This bristling little book embarks on nothing less than a total 
diagnosis of our sick capitalist present. Rambatan and
Johanssen cut right to the chase in their incisive reading of forms of 
contemporary enjoyment online, disclosing a mutation
in Lacan’s four discourses.
Professor Sianne Ngai



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