Cristina Iuli
Cristina Iuli teaches American Literature and American Studies at Università del Piemonte Orientale, and at the American Studies Master Program of the University of Torino, Italy. She specializes in twentieth century and contemporary American Literature. Her essays have been published on Modernism/modernity, Arizona Quarterly, The European Journal of English Studies and other journals. Lately, she has co-edited with Paola Loreto La Letteratura degli Stati Uniti, dal Rinascimento Americano ai nostri giorni (2017), and has edited and translated into Italian Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (2017) and Cary Wolfe's Davanti alla legge: umani e altri animali nella biopolitica (2017).
Articles of Cristina Iuli
Animated Animals and Metabolic Machines: Affect in Vilém Flusser’s Theory
This essay analyzes Flusser’s playful engagement with the nature/culture divide and its implications for Affect theory and posthumanism. For Flusser, affect is not a pre-processed human feeling, but a composite of moods, emotions, automated habits, and recursively activated reactions that come from outside – the apparatus of communication, conventions and algorithms that encode what counts as truth. Affect partakes of the same process that binds the “artificial” production of “truth” and the “customization” of life according to conventional knowledge. Similarly, the “natural” world dissected in Natural:Mind is subject to determinations by technology, culture, and habit; in fact, nature is produced by culture as part of the apparatus. Flusser’s version of affect theory destroys the fantasy of the human individual and indicates how humans do not exist in essence, but are themselves symptomatic expressions of the modern, programmatic society. Flusser’s twisted humanism invites a reflection on the cognitive and critical possibilities of aesthetics – as a secondary, reflective form of knowledge that provides models to grasp unhabitual and unusual phenomena even if it cannot account for their occurrence. Art in this sense functions like a Trojan horse used to storm the naturalist fortress sheltering humanist humanity.