Umbr Technology - a Author:Paul-Laurent Assoun, Levi R. Bryant, Russell Grigg, Bernard Stiegler, Graham Harman, Alain Badiou, Oxana Timofeeva & Lorenzo Chiesa, Marc De Kesel, Samo Tomsic Psychoanalysis loves technology. — The truth of this statement is a reversal of the fundamental misunderstanding at the instant of the glance according to which psychoanalysis is ambivalent about -- if not implacably resistant to and expressly critical of -- the challenging claim (herausfordernden Anspruch) that, from cloud computing and unmanned... more » aerial vehicles (UAV) to additive manufacturing (AM) and the psychic apparatus, does not stop writing itself in modern technology. This is not to suggest that psychoanalysis loves all technology, much less everything that makes the human animal a Prothesengott, a "Prosthetic God" or "God with prostheses"; technology is irreducible to the imaginary extension of the bodily ego and its capacities or the symbolic autonomy of its detached pieces or spare parts (pièces détachées). Nor is it to suggest that this love is synonymous with the object of narcissism or the subject supposed to know that supports transference. In Totem and Taboo, Freud introduces the possibility of the invention of a "new weapon" in order to account for the murder of the father of the mythical primal horde in addition to the logic and temporality of ambivalence that, in the après-coup of the passage à l'acte, the sons -- qua the original partners in crime -- experience as hateloving (hainamoration). "They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires," "but they loved and admired him too," and this "fresh emotional attitude" is the subjective moment of a symptomatic partnership with technology that writes the logic of fantasy in the social body it retroactively constitutes. "One day," Freud explains, "the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength)." If psychoanalysis indeed loves technology it is insofar as it loves this undecidable but real invention, between being and having, to which the trace of such an equivocal new weapon bears witness in the moment of concluding the hateloving specific to the analytic experience.« less