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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.

Gregor, bound to the job of traveling salesman to support his family and pay off their business debts, awakes in the body of an insect-like animal. Since their son can no longer work, the father and mother first suffer an economic downgrade from middle to working class, but then experience a surprising flourishing of strength and purpose. A final scene, which appears as a sarcastic or manic episode in light of the previous narrative, shows the remaining members of the family blithely taking a day off of work for a trip to the countryside, the parents’ attention newly focused on the body of their daughter. [...]he cannot escape the body, which famously resists representation, even while calling for the reader’s configurations. According to this variant, Polyneices brought other men with him that were not buried either.

Clara, Clara,ach, ach. Kittler’s early article on “The Sandman” embraces the doppelgänger both at the thematic level of psychic disturbance and at the logical level of the text’s own paired step. Kittler sets the stakes of his inquiry very high, arguing for a programmatic overhaul of the relation between psychology and literature. He enacts what he calls a “decentering” of the story in the direction of psychoanalysis, but in the process reinscribes Clara as a model of interpretive illumination. Restoring the hermeneutic import of Clara’s effacing self-accusation of stupidity with the work of Avital Ronell reveals a larger dissemblance:

Examining Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas in terms of terrorism, I focus on a subset of critics who move beyond the debate over how to categorize Kohlhaas's violence through its means or ends, and instead point to moments of his attacks that exceed even the explanation he offers. Following this excessive violence through the framing devices of Kohlhaas's manifestos allows me to describe terrorism as an attack not only on specific people and things but on political representation itself. Reading the novella alongside Hannah Arendt's late work On Violence then reveals that it takes a specific narrative stand on this representational attack by describing the historical shift that opens when the people question their identification with the sovereign, without replacing him with either the rebel challenger or a legitimate successor.

Here we have come to a scene at the far end of Gottsched's exclusion of the particular in art. [...]Landgraf points out that we have not observed a simple inversion but a collision of the particular with the rule that was to exclude it. Landgraf carefully defines his terms throughout (such as \"iterability,\" \"non-trivial machine,\" \"recursive reproduction,\" \"functional differentiation,\" and \"collaborative emergence\") and uses them in a way that offers a vision of their potential use in relation to other time periods and texts. Given the connection between the dialogic and democratic in Müller's thought, this view of creation can be seen to highlight questions of politics as well as art in that it speaks of self-rule as another provocation of aesthetic autonomy that comes to us by way of the eighteenth century.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives freedom a body when he opens the first chapter of The Social Contract with the famous sentence: “Man was/is born free [est né] and everywhere he is in chains.”¹ His argument draws its force not only from a strong opposition between nature and culture but also from a multivalent temporality. Where English forces a decision, birth, in Rousseau’s French, assumes either a historical or an ontological cast depending on how one reads the verb est. A first reading transposes the biblical story of the fall into politics, recounting that man was born free but is now enslaved.

\"4 In other words, identity dissolves and reconstitutes itself over the course of the drama. [...]Bloch emphasizes that like Hegel's spirit, Faust always progresses to a higher level. [...]it thrilled Hegel's generation and resulted in more reviews even than the later Faust I.7 In terms of Goethe's developing conception of the drama, scholars consider one of the most important aspects of the Fragment to be \"die große Lücke,\" the absence of the pact scene, which, in Fausti ingeniously and perplexingly codifies the relation between striving and damnation. [...]Hegel removes the use of the subjunctive mood at the end (\"hätt' er,\" \"müßte doch\"), replacing it with the indicative. [...]since there is also a dash in the original text, this interruption also disguises itself as merely an additional citation. First of all,\" when his soul is taken up by the angels, this does little to explain the significance of Faust's striving.\" [...]the subjunctive tense of Faust's final words merely \"refers us back to the terms of Faust's agreement with Mephistopheles.\"