Sex, Machines and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present

Sex, Machines and Navels offers a rigorous critical re-reading of fictions of humanity, history, technology and postmodern culture. Taking psychoanalysis into cyberspace, the book develops an innovative theoretical perspective on the relationship between bodies and machines to offer a focused re-examination of notions of desire, metaphor, sexed identity and difference and the process of technological transformation. The book unravels one figure in a detailed, lucid and extensive revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis in association with postmodern theory, feminism and deconstruction. Problematizing the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens onto networks of desire, history, culture and machines. Linked to the unconscious, to jokes and dreams, navels appear on the bodies of replicants and in the technological matrix, a strange excess in a future imagined in terms of corporeal "meat" or posthuman machine. The book closely examines postmodern and cyberpunk texts (by Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker) alongside detailed readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists.