Search results for ""Author Stefan Herbrechter""

Cy-Borges—this compound word seems almost destined. It allows the associations of cyber—and cyborg to converge around the name of Jorge Luis Borges, many of whose writings are strangely prescient thought-experiments in the impossible and the unconfigurable. For though Borges speaks scantily of technology and hardly at all of the cyber-cultural futures that make it possible, his speculative fictions and other prose writings contrive glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more typically associated with writers like William Gibson and Philip K. Dick or films like Blade Runner and The Matrix. Yet the posthuman, as that which reconfigures the actual and the possible once technology re-engineers human potential and institutes a new physics, is everywhere in Borges. As this collection shows through a series of close readings of his work, Borges is therefore the precursor whom posthumanism would have had to invent had he not existed.

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H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . is Derrida's literary critical recollection of his lifelong friendship with Hélène Cixous. The main figure that informs Derrida's reading here is that of "taking sides." While Hélène Cixous in her life and work takes the side of life, "for life," Derrida admits always feeling drawn to the side of death. Rather than being an obvious choice, taking the side of life is an act of faith, by wagering one's life on life. H. C. for Life sets up and explores this interminable "argument" between Derrida and Cixous as to what death has in store deep within life itself, before the end. In addition to being a memoir, it is also a theoretical confrontation—for example about the meaning of "might" and "omnipotence," and a philosophical and philological analysis of the crypts within the vast oeuvre of Hélène Cixous. Finally, the book is Derrida's tribute to the thought of the woman whom he regards as one of the great French poets, writers, and thinkers of our time.

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