Fantasies of Self-Mourning : : Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite / / Ruben Borg.

• Author: Borg, Ruben.
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden,, Boston : : Brill | Rodopi,, 2019.
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Critical Posthumanisms 2.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (230 pages)

In Fantasies of Self-Mourning Ruben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book’s central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O’Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body—or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Posthuman Modernism -- A History of Narcissistic Wounds -- The Apocalyptic Chronotope -- Thinking Historicity with Trees -- Funny Being Dead! Tragic and Comic Laughter -- Conclusion: Passivity of the Eye.