Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl(Univocal)

A close examination of the relationship between media, art, and the "Electra complex" The feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Electra is a philosophy of "the girl" as a model of contemporary transgressive subjectivity. Elisabeth von Samsonow asserts that focusing on the girl's escape from the Oedipus complex leads to a fundamental shift in our most common views on media and art. Presenting an interpretation of contemporary technics, Anti-Electra argues that technology today encompasses Electra's gadgets and toys. According to von Samsonow, satellite drive technologies such as wireless telephones, WLAN, and GPS echo the "preoedipal constellation" that the girl specializes in. And with the help of the girl, the cartography of overlapping zones between humankind and animals, as well as between humankind and apparatuses, is redesigned through what the book holds as a "radical totemism." Anti-Electra ultimately offers a new view on gender, the contemporary world dyed by symbolic girlism, and the (universal) girl in critical dialogue with media, ecology, and society.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Preface to the English Language Edition Introduction 1. Electra as Female “Oedipus” Positive Unrelatedness and Exogamy Constitutive Strangeness or Primary Exoticism Schizogamy Xenological Anamnesis Totemistic “Objectification” 2. Radical Totemism and Automatism Theogenesis and the Twilight of Machines Totem and Xenocracy Animal Mummy and the Apparatus-Function Anthropomorphization of the Deity Apparatus or Weak Totem 3. Totemism and Sculpture: Preliminaries to a Theory of Schizosoma Metabolism and Therapeutic Schizosoma Pre-oedipality as a “Plastic Phase” Excursus: Plasma, Forming, Sculpture The Statue Delivering Oracles The Two-Body Doctrine The One and the Many Social Sculpture 4. The Labyrinth: General Theory of Schizosoma Pasiphae’s Cow The Satellite 5. The Four Pre-oedipal Objects Failing Equalization and the Emergence of the Complex Electrification Appendix Index

About the Author :
Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist, writer, curator, and professor of philosophical and historical anthropology at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Two of her books have been translated into English: Transplants and Epidemic Subjects-Radical Ontology. Anita Fricek is an Australian artist based in Vienna. Stephen Zepke is an independent researcher and author of Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future.

Review :
"Anti-Electra constitutes an occasionally uncanny and always fascinating work, which advocates a constellational, schizogamous relationality. This intellectually engaging and witty book will be of interest to art historians, scholars with interests in media studies, and those who are open to be challenged by an exciting feminist revaluation of ancient myths and their relation to the present."-Identities