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

This work offers a critical re-reading of fictions of humanity, history, technology and postmodern culture. Taking psychoanalysis into cyberspace, the book develops an theoretical perspective on the relationship with bodies and machines to offer a focused re-examination of the notions of desire, metaphor, sexed identity and difference and the process of technological transformation. The book inravels the navel in a detailed revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis in association with postmodern theory, feminism and deconstruction. Problematizing the easy conjucntion of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens onto networks of desire, history, culture and machines. Linked to the unconcious, to jokes and dreams, navels appear on the bodies of replicants and in the technological matrix, a stranged 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 and Rudy Rucker) alongside readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists.