Divinization and Technology The Political Anthropology of Subversion

This book offers a political anthropological discussion of subversion, exploring its imbrication with technological and divinization practices, and uncovering some of its particular effects on human existence, from prehistory until the contemporary age. Subversion is often romanticized as a means of opposing or undermining power in the name of supposedly universal values, yet techniques of subversion are actually deployed by people of all modern political and philosophical persuasions. With subversion having become a tool of mainstream ‘power’ that threatens to dominate social and political reality and so render the populace servile and subject to a generalized culture industry, Divinization and Technology examines the ways in which technology and divinization, withtheir efforts to unite with divine powers, can be brought together as modalities of subversion.

List of Figures List of Contributors Preface (Agnes Horvath, Camil Roman and Gilbert Germain) Introduction: Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion (Agnes Horvath, Camil Roman and Gilbert Germain) 1. Stepping into Sterility: Divinization and Technology (Agnes Horvath) 2. Technology and the Subversion of Control (Gil Germain) 3. The Modern Schismogenesis in European Thought and Politics and the Rise of the Derivative Self: Subversion as Divinizing the Void (Camil Roman) 4. The Fool’s Subversion: Technique of Estrangement in Bruegel’s Work (Federica Montagni) 5. The Subversion of Subversion: Critique unto Infinity in the ‘Social’ Media (Tom Boland) 6. Subversion and Conversion: From Revolutionary Communism to Dissidence (Harald Wydra) 7. The Subversion of Virtuous Drinking (John O’Brien) 8. Mammon and the Subversion of Values: A Theological Analysis (Paul Tyson) 9. Neoclassical Economics as a Logic of Subversion (Arpad Szakolczai) Conclusion (Agnes Horvath, Camil Roman and Gil Germain) Index

Agnes Horvath is a founding and chief editor of International Political Anthropology. She taught in Hungary, Ireland and Italy, and was affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University. Camil Francisc Roman is Lecturer in Political Science at the John Cabot University, Roma Tre University and LUMSA University, Rome. He is also an acting editor of International Political Anthropology. Gilbert Germain is Professor of Political Thought at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. He is the author of several books, including Thinking About Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality and Spirits in The Material World: The Challenge of Technology.