ABSTRACT
If technologies increasingly shape the very fabric of our selfhood – including the desires, goals and ideals that we consider as most personal – how then to recognize this unsettled structure of the self and prevent adopting the view that the self is not more than a plaything of contingent influences and forces. In the wake of univocal standards being challenged, undermined and modified by an external and internal (extimate) technological “other,” the question how to form ourselves becomes evermore acute. How is it against this background still possible to sustain the ideal of “good self-formation”? In this chapter it is worked out in detail how technological self-formation can be conceived in terms of “technological sublimation,” which also redefines the very notion of “human enhancement.” This esthetic conception of self-formation as sublimation is developed on the basis of insights derived from Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche and Peirce. In addition, the idea of critical self-formation by virtue of longer-term goals and ideals is taken up again and further integrated in the proposed self-formation as sublimation framework.
