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The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, by Lydia Liu, is the first in-depth study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. The book shows how the convergences of literary modernism, mathematics, and psychoanalysis in the 20th century transformed the alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic, and universal system of today’s digital media. Altering the threshold of sense and nonsense in a communication processes, this remarkable event has compelled a new understanding of language, human-machine interplay, and the Freudian unconscious.
Lydia H. Liu, W.T. Tom Professor in the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
McKenzie Wark, Associate Dean of Eugene Lang College at the New School
