In its discussion of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story , this essay shows how posthuman fantasies of a bodiless existence come about through processes of digital remediation similar to those described in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s now classic study of new media. For these critics, Western desires for unfiltered encounters with reality paradoxically result in the proliferation of new media forms that substitute “hypermediacy” for “immediacy.” Likewise, in Shteyngart’s novel, characters’ desires for attenuated or completely erased bodies are realized in the act of multiplying their bodies’ relationships with information technologies. In this respect, the novel enables us to explore the ways that a new posthuman realism shapes human bodies, desires, and politics in the digital age.
From the Publisher: ::: With his idiosyncratic blend of ideas from Lacan and Hegel, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has emerged as one of the most original thinkers of our time. Never missing an opportunity to recount a revealing anecdote or joke, his writing is as entertaining as it is informative. Untangling a heady mix of fantasy and ideology, Zizek is sure to entertain his readers. 288 pp.
We prove that groups acting geometrically on delta-quasiconvex spaces contain no essential Baumslag-Solitar quotients as subgroups. This implies that they are translation discrete, meaning that the translation numbers of their nontorsion elements are bounded away from zero.