The Digital Logic of Death : : Confronting Mortality in Contemporary Media / / Steven Pustay.

• VerfasserIn: Pustay, Steven,
• Place / Publishing House: New York : : Bloomsbury Academic & Professional,, 2021.; [London, England] : : Bloomsbury Publishing,, 2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Edition: First edition.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (x, 211 pages) :; illustrations (black and white); digital file(s).
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

"In The Digital Logic of Death , Steven Pustay skillfully makes visible the immensely important but often overlooked role that moving images play in shaping our understanding of mortality. This relationship, he argues, is made all the more urgent by the technologies of the digital age, which have profoundly altered our ability to represent and contemplate death through moving images, resulting in an entirely new cultural logic of death. To draw out this new logic, Pustay presents accessible readings of otherwise dense and difficult philosophical approaches to death ? such as those found in existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory ? by reading them through the lens of contemporary media. From art-house films like Irrv̌ersible and The Fountain to blockbusters like the Matrix trilogy, from television commercials for M&M's to pay-cable dramas like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad , from first-person shooters like Bioshock to indie-games like LIMBO , Pustay shows how moving images have shifted our understanding of death in general and our recognition of our own finiteness in particular."-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Digital Logic of Death -- Knowing Death -- Showing Death -- 1 The Trauma of Digital Death -- In Effigie, In Absentia -- The Jouissance of Death (Witnessing) -- The Pornography of Death (Representing) -- The Sublimity of Death (Simulating) -- Time Destroys Everything -- 2 The Digital Path to Death -- Death in Digital Games -- Re-animation -- Compossibility -- Recurrence, Subjectivity, Contemplation -- The Path to Death -- After the Game is Before the Game -- 3 The Potential of Digital Death -- Possibilistic to the Limit.

Anxiety and Angst (Possibility and Authenticity) -- Being-toward-Death (Potentiality, Resoluteness, Immanence) -- Split Subjectivity (Potentiality, Reflection, Ecstasis) -- The Road to Awe -- 4 The Event of Digital Death -- The One or the Multiple -- Cyborgs, Androids, and Immortal Machines -- Being as Multiplicity (Axiomatic vs. Problematic) -- Death as Event (Consistency and Inconsistency) -- Everything That Has a Beginning Has an End -- Conclusion: The Fractal Logic of Life -- The Micro and the Macro -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.