ABSTRACT

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, with their efforts to unite with divine powers, can be brought together as modalities of subversion.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

Divinisation and technology – the political anthropology of subversion

chapter 1|18 pages

Stepping into sterility

Divinisation and technology

chapter 4|19 pages

The fool’s subversion

Technique of estrangement in Bruegel’s work

chapter 5|18 pages

The subversion of subversion

Critique unto infinity in the ‘social’ media

chapter 6|22 pages

Subversion and conversion

From revolutionary communism to dissidence

chapter 8|15 pages

Mammon and the subversion of values

A theological analysis