Routledge Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations

This book is a psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of how the digital is transforming our perception of the world and our understanding of ourselves. Drawing on examples from everyday life, myth, and popular culture, this book argues that virtual reality is only the latest instantiation of the phenomenon of the virtual, which is intrinsic to human being. It illuminates what is at stake in our understanding of the relationship between the virtual and the real, showing how our present technologies both enhance and diminish our psychological lives. The authors claim that technology is a pharmakon - at the same time both a remedy and a poison - and in their writing exemplify a method that overcomes the polarization that compels us to regard it either as a liberating force or a dangerous threat in human life. The digital revolution challenges us to reckon with the implications of what is being called our posthuman condition, leaving behind our modern conception of the world as constituted by atemporal essences and reconceiving it instead as one of processes and change. The book’s postscript considers the sudden plunge into the virtual effected by the 2020 global pandemic. Accessible and wide-reaching, this book will appeal not only to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, but anyone interested in the ways virtuality and the digital are transforming our contemporary lives. Review ‘Whether we embrace it or resist it, digital communication is one of the defining facts of our times. In their rivetingly thorough and engaging account, Frankel and Krebs show us what psychoanalysis has to do with and do for our digital age. And like all the more interesting psychoanalytical books, it is about far more than psychoanalysis.’ Adam Phillips, general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics, translations of Sigmund Freud; author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; Going Sane; Side Effects; Missing Out; One Way and Another; and most recently, The Cure for Psychoanalysis ‘Secluded during the COVID pandemic, I sank into this extraordinary and utterly timely work. Human Virtuality and Digital Life pursues the deeper ambiguities and opportunities of our suddenly, radically digitalized existences. Ranging effortlessly from bison painted on caves to the semiotics of photography to our new "0-1" worlds, from Plato and Walter Benjamin to D.W Winnicott and Guy Debord, the authors consider the way seeing, thinking, and being will change, the way truth, time, and space will bend, the way our most private possession, our own psyches, will be both impoverished and enriched by what is no longer a dream but is our waking present. A brilliant work.’ George Makari, director, DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine; author of Soul Machine: The Making of the Modern Mind and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis ‘This ground-breaking book is a must-read for anybody interested in how the meaning of the human is being reshaped by digital communication. Who are we becoming as we relate to others and to ourselves via social media, and virtual worlds? How are technological enhancements of human life transforming who we are? This book offers exciting new perspectives on these timely questions that broaden tremendously our way of understanding the media-enhanced world that we have created and is (re-)creating us. Viewing technology as a pharmakon that can be both a remedy and a poison, the different chapters offer powerful elucidations of the ways in which the digitalization of our lives has transformed our world and our capacity to experience and imagine. Using insights from both philosophy and psychoanalysis, the book brilliantly explores digital and virtual technology as "a laboratory of subjectivity" that opens up new possibilities for human existence and new configurations of selfhood and otherness. This mesmerizing book is at the forefront of contemporary philosophica