Kittler F. The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014 — 400 p. — ISBN10: 0804792542; ISBN13: 978-0804792547. With an Afterword by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Translated by Erik Butler.Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) combined the study of literature, cinema, technology, and philosophy in a manner sufficiently novel to be recognized as a new field of academic endeavor in his native Germany. "Media studies," as Kittler conceived it, meant reflecting on how books operate as films, poetry as computer science, and music as military equipment. This volume collects writings from all stages of the author's prolific career. Exemplary essays illustrate how matters of form and inscription make heterogeneous source material (e.g., literary classics and computer design) interchangeable on the level of function — with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the humanities and the "hard sciences." Rich in counterintuitive propositions, sly humor, and vast erudition, Kittler's work both challenges the assumptions of positivistic cultural history and exposes the over-abstraction and language games of philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida. The twenty-three pieces gathered here document the intellectual itinerary of one of the most original thinkers in recent times — sometimes baffling, often controversial, and always stimulating.Poet, Mother, Child: On the Romantic Invention of Sexuality
Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Lullaby of Birdland
The God of the Ears
Flechsig, Schreber, Freud: An Information Network at the Turn of the Century
Romanticism, Psychoanalysis, Film: A Story of Doubles
Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War
Heinrich von Ofterdingen as Data Feed
World-Breath: On Wagner's Media Technology
The City Is a Medium
Rock Music: A Misuse of Military Equipment
Signal-to-Noise Ratio
The Artificial Intelligence of World War: Alan Turing
Unconditional Surrender
Protected Mode
There Is No Software
Il fiore delle truppe scelte
Eros and Aphrodite
Homer and Writing
The Alphabet of the Greeks: On the Archeology of Writing
In the Wake of the Odyssey
Martin Heidegger, Media, and the Gods of Greece: De-severance
Heralds the Approach of the Gods
Pathos and Ethos: An Aristotelian Observation
Media History as the Event of Truth: On the Singularity of Friedrich A. Kittler s Works: An Afterword by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht