Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications. He is the author of Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern University Press 2021), Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (Bloomsbury 2017), The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).
Dr. Flisfeder is currently working on a project funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant called, “The Hysterical Sublime: A Critical Study of the Aesthetics, Rhetorics, and Ethics of New Materialist and Posthumanist Critical Theory.” Through a critical examination of New Materialist and Posthumanist critical theory, this project endeavours to produce a new theory of dialectical humanism for theorizing the twin dilemmas of anthropogenic climate change and the displacement of human agency by digital automation and artificial intelligence. Dialectical humanism aims to shift our critical gaze away from contradictory critiques of Anthropocentrism and the “Anthropocene,” and onto the structural contradictions of twenty-first century capitalism, or the “Capitalocene.”
Experience
2019–present
Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications, University of Winnipeg
2016–2019
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communications, University of Winnipeg
2014–2016
Assistant Professor of Media and Political Theory, Ryerson University
Education
2010
Ryerson University and York University, Ph.D. Communication and Culture
2005
Ryerson University and York University, M.A. Communication and Culture
2003
York University, B.A. Hon Double Major in Fine Arts Cultural Studies and Communication Studies
Publications
2021
Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, Northwestern University Press
2019
Postmodern Marxism Today: Jameson, Žižek, and the Demise of Symbolic Effciency, International Journal of Žižek Studies
2019
'Make American Great Again' and the Constitutive Loss of Nothingness, Third Text
2018
'Trump' - What does the name signify? Or, Protofascism and the Alt-Right: Three Contradictions of the Present Conjuncture, Cultural Politics
2018
The Ideological Algorithmic Apparatus: Subjection Before Enslavement, Theory & Event
2017
Love and Sex in the Age of Capitalist Realism: On Spike Jonze's Her, Cinema Journal
2017
Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner, Bloomsbury
2017
Morality or Enjoyment? On Althusser's Ideological Supplement of the Law, Mediations
2015
The Entrepreneurial Subject and the Objectivization of the Self in Social Media, South Atlantic Quarterly
2014
Enjoying Social Media, Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader
2014
Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader, Palgrave Macmillan
2013
Communism and the End of the World, PUBLIC
2013
Debt: The Sublimated Object of Capital, TOPIA
2012
The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek's Theory of Film, Palgrave Macmillan
Grants and Contracts
2020
The Hysterical Sublime: A Critical Study of the Aesthetics, Rhetorics, and Ethics of New Materialist and Posthumanist Critical Theory
Role:
Principal Investigator
Funding Source:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada