Book Description

Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology provocatively argues that technology is best understood as an otherworldly or spiritual force. Under its influence, humans are fast becoming spirit-like creatures, beings who assume their bodies are incidental to what it means to be human and the "real world" an accidental quality of the human condition. Technology authorizes such an understanding and legitimates a manner of action that obscures the centrality of embodiment and its significance. Gil Germain challenges many of the assumptions underpinning the technological worldview through a reading of leading contemporary theorists who have addressed the interconnection between technology and disembodiment. The book both reveals and contests the multifarious ways in which technology's spiritual thrust is manifested in contemporary thought and practice. While respecting technology's hold on modernity and its predisposition toward disembodiment, Germain gives important reasons why this inclination toward spiritizaiion ought to be resisted and what shape this resistance must take if it is to be meaningful. Gil Germain is associate professor of political studies at the University of Prince Edward Book jacket.