Brian Rotman: Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (2008)

Becoming Beside Ourselves continues the investigation that the renowned cultural theorist and mathematician Brian Rotman began in his previous books Signifying Nothing and Ad Infinitum…The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: exploring certain signs and the conceptual innovations and subjectivities that they facilitate or foreclose. In Becoming Beside Ourselves, Rotman turns his attention to alphabetic writing or the inscription of spoken language. Contending that all media configure what they mediate, he maintains that alphabetic writing has long served as the West’s dominant cognitive technology. Its logic and limitations have shaped thought and affect from its inception until the present. Now its grip on Western consciousness is giving way to virtual technologies and networked media, which are reconfiguring human subjectivity just as alphabetic texts have done for millennia.

Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.

With a Foreword by Timothy Lenoir
Publisher Duke University Press, 2008
ISBN 0822342006, 9780822342007
176 pages

Commentary (Ben Pritchett, Mute)
Review (Stevan Harnad, Times Literary Supplement)

Publisher
Google books

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António R. Damásio: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994)

“Although I cannot tell for certain what sparked my interest in the neural underpinnings of reason, I do know when I became convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality could not be correct.” Thus begins a book that takes the reader on a journey of discovery, from the story of Phineas Gage, the famous nineteenth-century case of behavioral change that followed brain damage, to the contemporary recreation of Gage’s brain; and from the doubts of a young neurologist to a testable hypothesis concerning the emotions and their fundamental role in rational human behavior. Drawing on his experiences with neurological patients affected by brain damage (his laboratory is recognized worldwide as the foremost center for the study of such patients), Antonio Damasio shows how the absence of emotion and feeling can break down rationality. In the course of explaining how emotions and feelings contribute to reason and to adaptive social behavior, Damasio also offers a novel perspective on what emotions and feelings actually are: a direct sensing of our own body states, a link between the body and its survival-oriented regulations, on the one hand, and consciousness, on the other. Descartes’ Error leads us to conclude that human organisms are endowed from the very beginning with a spirited passion for making choices, which the social mind can use to build rational behavior.

Publisher Avon Books, a division of The Hearst Corporation, NY, 1994
ISBN 0380726475, 9780380726479
312 pages

wikipedia
google books

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Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982–) [EN, DE, PT, ES]

This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault’s work as a whole.

To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault’s work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault’s work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method—”interpretative analytics”—capable of explaining both the logic of structuralism’s claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition.

First published in 1982
Second Edition With an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1983
ISBN 0226163121, 9780226163123
256 pages

German edition
Translated by Claus Rath and Ulrich Raulff
Originally published by Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1987
Second edition
Publisher Beltz Athenäum Verlag, Weinheim, 1994
ISBN 3895470503
327 pages

Foucault at Monoskop wiki

review (Peter Kemp, History and Theory)
review (Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory)
review (Dominick Lacapra, The American Historical Review)
review (David Hoy, London Review of Books)
review (Michael Donnelly, American Journal of Sociology)
review (Ian Hacking, The Journal of Philosophy)
review (Mary Maynard, The British Journal of Sociology)
review (Randall McGowen, Comparative Literature)
review (Mark Seltzer, Diacritics)

Publisher (EN)
Google books (EN)

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (English, 1982/1983)
Michel Foucault: Zwischen Strukturalismus und Hermeneutik (German, trans. Claus Rath and Ulrich Raulff, 1987/1994, no OCR)
Foucault. Uma trajetória filosófica. Para além do estruturalismo e da hermenêutica (Portuguese, trans. Vera Porto Carrero, 1995, low-res, no OCR, added on 2014-3-6)
Foucault: más allá del estructuralismo y la hermenéutica (Spanish, trans. Rogelio C. Paredes, 2001, added on 2014-5-27)