Following a short discussion of the German philosopher Friedrich A. Kittler’s biographical and intellectual formation, this interview introduces the reader to Kittler’s theoretical efforts to develop our understanding of contemporary culture and society. However, the focus of the interview is on the core concepts of ‘discourse networks’, ‘the military-industrial complex’, and ‘technology’, arguably the three central themes of Kittler’s work to date. As the title of the interview indicates, the idea of ‘cultural mathematics’ is also considered important in this account (...) of Kittler’s particular contribution to social and cultural theory, although this and related notions are critically appraised together with an assessment of their theoretical, social and cultural impact. (shrink)

Bridging feminist new materialism and feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis’s volume, Bodies of Water, discusses water in terms of nurturing maternality based on a figural reservoir of what she terms “amniotics” and “planetary breastmilk” in order to posit this maternality as the material condition of the embodiment of life. In this article I show that this imagery is a construction consistently haunted by figures of anxiety and loss. I do this by first revisiting earlier interventions in deconstruction concerning materiality and feminist (...) theory as follows. First, pointing out a resonance between this figuration of wateriness and Kant’s notion of the dynamic sublime, I turn to Paul de Man’s reading of materiality in the Kantian sublime in order to suggest that Neimanis’s figuration of maternal water is an effect of an aesthetic ideology. Subsequently, I will revisit Diana Fuss’s reading of Irigaray – Neimanis’s main feminist resource – to show that the ontological status of water as maternal is constructed via an Irigarayan distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Finally, in order to show ways in which the maternal materiality of water is haunted by figures of anxiety and loss, I will consult Elissa Marder’s more recent work on the maternal function. (shrink)