POST-BODILY INTIMACY IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA CULTURE

Abstract

This paper explores the transformation of intimacy in contemporary media culture, starting from the thesis that the gradual replacement of haptic mutual presence with technologically mediated forms creates a specific relational formation or post-corporeal intimacy. Through a qualitative interdisciplinary analysis of five films: Her (Jonze, 2013), Black Mirror: Be Right Back (Harris, 2013), Black Mirror: Striking Vipers (Slade, 2019), Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) and Ex Machina (Garland, 2014)), this paper can distinguish four key findings: the voice as a substitute for bodily presence, algorithmic empathy as affective realism, eroticism that is maintained through anticipation and projection rather than through touch, and last (fourth) but most significant finding is the intensification of desire, rather than its disappearance in the absence of the body.
Drawing on Michael Epstein’s philosophy of haptics and eros, N. Catherine Hales’ concept of the posthuman body, Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, Rosie Braidotti’s affirmative posthumanism, and Sarah Ahmed and Lauren Berlant’s affect theory, as well as Sherry Turkle’s empirical research on online intimacy, the paper argues that post-corporeal intimacy represents a truly new affective structure. This new intimacy neither directly extends physical love nor impoverishes it, but rather represents a reorganization of desire itself.