Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Zizek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present.
Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in Zizek's thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements.
Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a Zizekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.
Clint Burnham is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada, where he also teaches theory and popular culture. His books include The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory (1995), The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2011), and the collections Digital Natives (2011, co-ed. with Lorna Brown) and From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom (2012, co-ed. with Paul Budra).
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?
2. Slavoj Zizek as Internet Philosopher
3. Was Facebook an Event?
4. Is the Internet a Thing?
5. The Subject Supposed to LOL
6. Her: Or, There Is No Digital Relation (with Matthew Flisfeder)
7. The Selfie and the Cloud
Conclusion
Notes
Index