Jouissance of the paranoiac machine: posthumanism and futuristic bodies

Jouissance of the Paranoiac Machine argues that despite the rise of posthumanism and new materialism in recent decades, paranoiac sentiments about the loss of boundaries between humans and nonhumans still exert considerable influence on our subjectivity. Drawing on Jacques Lacan's theory, this dissertation argues that paranoiac symptoms demonstrate a lack of a stable Name-of-the-Father in our societal and discursive constructions surrounding the boundary between humans and nonhumans. This lack is a form of negation, but it is precisely this negation that gives positivity to human existence. The epistemological and ontological breakdown of boundaries, either through theoretical conceptualizations or advanced technologies, engenders Lacanian "jouissance"—a form of enjoyment that involves pain. Jouissance testifies to the lack embedded in human subjectivity and our Symbolic world, functioning as a "cut" in our fantasy of autonomy. Arguing for the "extimate" nature of human subjectivity, this dissertation prioritizes a topological understanding of human-nonhuman boundaries. It also draws attention to the tension between paranoia and posthuman symbiosis, maintaining the idea that paranoia against boundary dissolution is inevitable due to our fundamental lacking nature, but, at the same time, deploying aesthetics as a counterforce to paranoia. Chapter 1 showcases how the characters in Thomas Pynchon's novels experience jouissance erupting from their cyborgian bodies and how nonhuman creatures can function as an (imaginative) alternative to paranoia. Chapter 2 focuses on the lacking subjects in Philip K. Dick's novels and their pursuit of (animal)object of desire as a stabilizer for their paranoiac psyche, demonstrating how this pursuit paradoxically leads to the realization that the nonhuman has always already been a part of the human body. Chapter 2 also uses Theodor W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson's theories of autonomous art to analyze the music and politics of the Blade Runner movies by Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve. Chapter 3 deconstructs the paranoia of the masters in Octavia Butler's Kindred, arguing that the aesthetics in Afrofuturism can function as a form of politics against racism and that the protagonist's agential, (impossible) posthuman status performs an alternative to the melancholia in Afro-pessimism. Chapter 4 underscores the aesthetics of Monstrous Beauty in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, associating paranoia with the rise of bioengineering and the emergence of bio-jouissance, arguing that the novel series can facilitate an ecological understanding of the Lacanian topology.