French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary ‘nonhuman turn’ in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.
Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts – and questions – for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking.
Uncovers the nonhuman turn’s unexpected roots in the avant-gardes and mysticisms of nineteenth-century France.
Reviews
Chalmers' masterful work reads a range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French writers and thinkers in order to uncover a lineage of technological thought that sheds new light on contemporary non-human theory. Illuminating and insightful, this book is an indispensable contribution to current thinking about technics and the nonhuman turn. -- Ian James, University of Cambridge Taking her cue from the work of Bruno Latour and a nonhuman turn in cultural studies, she [ ...] explores a technologos running through avant-garde literary, technical, and Catholic thought. Interweaving these three discourses in which religious and non- religious writers . . . mobilise a particular set of associations when they write about technology to reveal a distinctively French school of writing about technics marks her contribution to historical-cultural scholarship. -- Carl Mitcham * Technology and Culture *
List of Figures
Series Editor's Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on Editions
Introduction: Unruly Technics
Technologos
1. The Technologos: A Sacrament of Synthesis
2. Technics of the Fiat: The Metaphysical Machines of Jean Richepin, Villiers
de lIsle-Adam, Marcel Schwob, and Alfred Jarry
3. Charles Cros and the Time of the Technologos
Apocalypse
4. Technics and the Apocalypse: Didier de Chousy
5. Technics and the Virtual: Alfred Jarry and Henri Bergson
6. The Therapeutic Algorithms of Raymond Roussel
Ontotechnics
7. Surreal Technics I: André Bretons Toolbox
8. Surreal Technics II: Tinkering with Gilbert Simondon
9. Gilles Deleuze and the Technologos
Conclusion: For the Love of Technics
Bibliography
Madeleine Chalmers is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Leicester. Her work revives modern French avant-garde writings to engage critically with twenty-first-century questions in the fields of science, technology, and epistemology.
