Abstract

For Alain Badiou the twentieth-century was characterized by a 'passion of the real', a hunt for the unadulterated that found its apotheosis not in the technological advances of modernity, but in the violence of war that that technology enabled. As we move into the twenty-first century, technology, and in particular the technology of representation, seems to be moving us ever further from the experience of the real, but as this article argues through an examination of the fiction of Tom McCarthy and Steven Hall, the relationship between inscription, hermeneutics and the real remains aesthetically and culturally productive. Taking as its theoretical grounding Friedrich Kittler's work on discourse networks and the Lacanian dialogue between the symbolic and the real, this article explores the deeper unconscious cultural resonances that are at once inside and beyond the interpretational paradigms of modernity. Kittler's post-hermeneutic dehumanisation of the discourse system finds expression in McCarthy and Hall's disarticulation of language from subjectivity and their reliance on flights of memory and processes of reproduction for an engagement with a sense of authentic agency.

Keywords

discourse, Steven Hall, networks, novel, post-hermeneutics, Friedrich Kittler, Jacques Lacan, Tom McCarthy

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