
Engineering Desire
Algorithmic Environments and the Promise of Wholeness
Ciano Aydin(Author)
Routledge (Publisher)
1st Edition
Will be published approx. on 2. September 2026
Book
Hardback
136 pages
978-1-041-38002-3 (ISBN)
Description
This book develops a Lacanian account of how data-driven technologies restructure desire and reshape subjectivity. Rather than treating algorithmic systems merely as tools of prediction or control, it argues that contemporary technological environments engage the subject at the level of its structural longing for wholeness. By presenting preferences as coherent and knowable, they cultivate the illusion that the divided subject can finally become complete.
Focusing on platforms such as Tinder, the book shows how algorithmic mediation transforms intimacy, recognition, and selfhood, bringing both risks and possibilities. Data-driven systems can obscure the constitutive lack at the heart of subjectivity while also opening spaces to confront it. Against views that frame desire as the pursuit of objects, the author advances a Lacanian perspective in which desire is structured by absence itself and explores how technological design might sustain more singular forms of subject formation.
Bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of technology, Engineering Desire develops a theory of data-driven technologies as lived environments that organize and transform the conditions of desire. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in philosophy of technology, media and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and sociology.
Focusing on platforms such as Tinder, the book shows how algorithmic mediation transforms intimacy, recognition, and selfhood, bringing both risks and possibilities. Data-driven systems can obscure the constitutive lack at the heart of subjectivity while also opening spaces to confront it. Against views that frame desire as the pursuit of objects, the author advances a Lacanian perspective in which desire is structured by absence itself and explores how technological design might sustain more singular forms of subject formation.
Bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of technology, Engineering Desire develops a theory of data-driven technologies as lived environments that organize and transform the conditions of desire. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in philosophy of technology, media and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and sociology.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
1 s/w Zeichnung, 1 s/w Abbildung
1 Line drawings, black and white; 1 Illustrations, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-041-38002-3 (9781041380023)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ciano Aydin is Full Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS) at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is the author of Extimate Technology: Self-Formation in a Technological World (Routledge, 2021). He has published in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Philosophy and Technology, AI & Society, Philosophical Psychology and other journals.
Content
1. Introduction 2.Technological Environments and the Formation of Desire 3. A Lacanian Account of Desire 4. Algorithmic Environments and the Displacement of the Symbolic 5. Technological Promises and Clinical Structures 6. Designing for Singularity 7. The Promise of Wholeness