Papers
Biotech Fantasia
published in 'Borderlands e-journal', 6.1, 2007
Biotechnology has emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alongside a variety of formulations of 'the ethical' and in this way biotechnology has become an ideological phenomenon swept up in structuring freedom and processes of designating living beings in a full and objective manner. In the twenty-first century the mapping of the genome has provided individuals with a means of full self-objectivisation which necessitates a rethinking of the ethical content of biotechnology as human life is laid bare. This paper examines the ideology critique of Slavoj Zizek at the turn of the twenty-first century to show how a post-rational ethics can be generated when the human subject is reduced to an 'objective' phenomenon.
LikeZizek and the Ontological Emergence of Technology
forthcoming in 'Cosmos & History', 2009
This discussion utilises the thought of Slavoj Žižek as a departure point to consider the ontological emergence of technology as techne in the conceptual encounter of the Abyss in Being.
Techne and Impossibility: Re-reading Zizek’s Ideology-Critique as Geistgekritik
forthcoming in 'International Journal of Zizek Studies', 2009
This discussion delineates and explores Zizek’s ideology-critique towards the end of conceptually distinguishing the deployment of techne as the other side of impossibility, as revealed by his dialectical materialism. Central to this task is the way Zizek phrases his definition of ideology, succinctly stated by Hallward as: “a symbolic field which contains [a filler] holding the place of some structural impossibility, while simultaneously disavowing this impossibility.” (Hallward 2003: 90) From this definition Zizek derives the task of his ideology-critique to be elucidating this ‘filler’ and its inherent impossibility, to the end of bringing forth a critical awareness of the presence of ideology and its demystification. (Zizek 1994: 4) Techne appears herein as the other side of impossibility as the credentials of this style of critique rest on there being an ideal point in constellations of value and social ties (Geist) in the aesthetics of the life-world that encourage the crafting of the identity of the human subject and, at the same moment, hide the full realisation of this identity from the subject, making it impossible for s/he to develop the identification of their subjectivity beyond merely a token gesture of what they can ‘become.’ Our central task for this discussion is thus to locate and articulate this moment of impossibility in its various modalities and elucidate techne on these grounds, revealing Zizek’s critique as on of Geist in the Adornian sense.
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