The Technological Introject: Friedrich Kittler Between Implementation and the Incalculable(Meaning Systems)

The Technological Introject explores the futures opened up across the humanities and social sciences by the influential media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Joining the German tradition of media studies and systems theory to the Franco-American theoretical tradition marked by poststructuralism, Kittler's work has redrawn the boundaries of disciplines and of scholarly traditions. The contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the cultural production and its technological entanglements.

About the Author :
Jeffrey Champlin teaches literature at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin and is an associate fellow at Bard College's Hannah Arendt Center. Avital Ronell is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature at New York University. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian at Stanford University. As a public intellectual and highly prolific writer, he contributes to fields as diverse as the histories of national literatures in Romance languages, Western philosophical traditions, and forms of aesthetic experience in twenty first-century everyday culture. He has published more than two thousand texts, translated into more than twenty languages. His latest books are Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012), Explosionen der Aufklärung: Diderot, Goya, Lichtenberg, Mozart (2013), After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), and Brüchige Gegenwart: Reflexionen und Reaktionen (2019). Elisabeth Weber is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include Verfolgung und Trauma: Zu Emmanuel Levinas' Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence (Passagen Verlag, 1990), Das Vergessen(e): Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren, coeditor (Turia and Kant, 1997), and Questioning Judaism (Stanford, 2004), a collection of interviews with Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and others. She has also edited several works by Jacques Derrida. Her edited volume Living Together: Jacques Derrida's Communities of Violence and Peace is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Jeffrey Champlin teaches literature at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin and is an associate fellow at Bard College's Hannah Arendt Center.

Review :
"Spearheaded by New York philosophy icon Avital Ronell, this book pays tribute to Germany's most controversial yet most original media theorist, who completely changed the German academic landscape by following his declared goal to drive the human out of the humanities. In completely new and exciting ways, the essays collected in this important volume introduce Friedrich Kittler's radical and challenging approach to the study of Western culture, literature, and philosophy to an American audience." -- -Arne Hocker University of Colorado Boulder "The Technological Introject marks a major contribution to the work of the late Friedrich Kittler, whose defining impact on the fields of discourse analysis, media studies, and the archaeology of technology is increasingly recognized. Featuring essays by well-established and emergent scholars and engaging all the major phases of Kittler's rich academic life-from his early studies of German literature to his late volumes on music and mathematics, including his recent work on the history of sound-the contributors position Kittler's work in relation to French poststructuralism, the German literary and philosophical tradition he reacted against, and the theories and practices of media discourse analysis which he significantly redefined and enlarged. Erudite and avant-garde, The Technological Introject is among the first volumes to offer a posthumous assessment of Kittler's reach and to map the considerable legacy of a major theorist on the way we think (all things) 'media.'" -- -Michael Wutz Weber State University