Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Posthumanities)
David Wills
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0816653461
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision.
With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lévinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.”
Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences.
David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.
Dorsality cary wolfe, serie s editor 5 Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics David Wills 4 Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy Roberto Esposito 3 When Species Meet Donna J. Haraway 2 The Poetics of DNA Judith Roof 1 The Parasite Michel Serres DORSALIT Y Thinking Back through Technology and Politics David Wills University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London Sections of chapters 1 and 2 were previously published in “Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality,”
43 FACADES OF THE OTHER expresses itself. . . . To approach the Other in conversation [discours] is to welcome his expression. . . . The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation” (Totality and Infinity, 50–52). Such formulations are not without difficulty, and, as I discuss later, the emphases of Otherwise than Being, where “expression” gives way to “exposure” and discourse is reconfigured in terms of “saying,” shed a different light on the
the new conceptual framework he is trying to develop. And yet it is on the basis of such an aporia FACADES OF THE OTHER 44 that Levinas’s work becomes susceptible to the type of “redirection” that I shall attempt hereafter. The paradox of the eye that speaks will receive further clarification, or complication, in the importance Levinas gives to the immediacy of expression as a form of prediscursive or prelinguistic signification, a notion of sense “prior to my Sinnbegung”: “The immediate is the
analyses that follow, I will try to point to the dorsal formations of such an ethics, in the first instance holding that it is only once one recognizes an originary technology, and a prosthetic human, hence a technology in the back, that one can begin to develop an ethos adequate to the challenges of the present age; and in the second instance, in more general terms, deriving whatever conceptual or philosophical advantage there is to be had from such a perspective, to let some sort of inventive
figurative set of gestures. It is as if, in looking at friendship as it articulates with politics, we see certain corporeal gestures or movements; as if there were complicated turns of amicable discourse deriving as much from friendship’s relation to the political as from its relation to the carnal, turns that imply and implicate, therefore, both a rhetoric and an erotics. And a technology, for (as I have argued from the beginning) the turn is to be conceived of as the originary corporeal