English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Elizabeth Ezra’s book expertly charts the gradual reshaping of once-established borders that exist between people and things. As objects have begun to develop a life of their own, people have become “prosthetically engaged with life beyond the human” (1). The moving global mass of communication has muddied the distinction between centre and periphery. Consumers ingest objects unabated, while sexual and racial objectification reduces “others” to objects of gratification, fascination and labour. By exploring how people relate to objects, it becomes clear how technology supplants human agency within a global economy. Consequently, for Ezra, globalisation becomes an ideal space in which to contemplate the fusion of technology and economics. Building on Jacques Derrida’s conception of “supplementation” through Bernard Stiegler’s notion of “prosthesis”, Ezra elucidates how objects, once designed as tools to complete people, have, in earnest, led to a paradoxical sense of deficiency. The human venture, to move beyond the national and onto the global, has exploited the in-built contradiction of the supplementary, which lends itself to the posthuman and the demarcation of any defining line in splitting the virtual from the actual. This book clearly illustrates how cinema is perfectly placed to trace the dehumanisation of the subject through the hyperconsumption of objects, “which begins as the supplementation of people by objects and results in the supplementation of objects by people” (8).

A Cinema of Things: Globalization and the Posthuman Object, by Elizabeth Ezra