Wills.+Dorsality

=Wills, David. Dorsality//.//= Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.

Abstract
In this highly original book, David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision.

Argument
Wills discusses what it is to be human by using reading from the likes of Heidegger and examines different angles of various philosophers. He describes the political force of rhetoric in an analysis of Nietzsche’s “God is dead.” "Wills ultimately reveals an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences".

Key Passages
"Therefore the turn is first of all an inflection, a bending, the movement of a limb that, as the Latin teaches us, is the sense of articulation. Within that logic, there is technology as soon as there are limbs, as soon as there is bending of those limbs, as soon as there is any articulation at all" (3).

"The death of God that is whispered or cited by Zarathustra or by the aphorist also stages the abyssal or chiasmatic relation between political discourse and what calls itself pure politics, the politics of deed rather than word. The supposedly watertight distinction between the words of a fictional persona who wanders down from his cave on the mountain, and those of a historical philosopher who strolls along the lakeside at Sils- Maria, around the bay of Rapallo, or up the mountain face to Èze, seems to founder on the basis of such a statement. Nietzsche will be held respon- sible for it whether he writes it or Zarathustra cites it" (214).

Selected Works Cited
Homer. //The Odyssey//, trans. Robert Fagles. London: Penguin, 1996. 77.

Sigmund Freud. //Civilization and Its Discontents//, trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961. 38.