Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Zizek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present. Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in Zizek's thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements. Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a Zizekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj ¿i¿ek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present. Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in ¿i¿ek's thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements. Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a ¿i¿ekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

Were there ever two formations with less in common than 'the Internet,' a machinic transmission of discrete data, and 'psychoanalysis,' a wild science of messy social relationality? Clint Burnham's genius is to show how psychoanalysis is indispensable to any robust theory of digital culture, but as well to reveal the cybernetics already at work in psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Zizek. In readings of multiple media, he vividly demonstrates the ongoing necessity of concepts like negation, enjoyment, and disavowal for making sense of aesthetic productions like cinema, social experiences like Facebook, and the cyber mode of production that binds online pleasures to offline battery factories. This is an expansive, fascinating book, offering its readers a dazzling plenty of speculation and critique.