Archive for publications, 2022

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

Mon Jan 31 17:51:06 GMT 2022





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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