Profile
Dominic Pettman is University Professor of Media and New Humanities. He has held previous positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Geneva, the University of Amsterdam, and the American University of Paris. His courses explore posthumanism, critical theory, Continental Philosophy, cultural studies, digital culture, animal studies, sound studies, new media, environmental humanities, and affect theory.
His most recent book is Sad Planets, co-authored with Eugene Thacker - a series of meditations on the "sad passions" associated with cosmic scale, (inter)planetary influence, climate change, and environmental crises.
Prior to this, he pubished three books as part of his unofficial "Eros & Ecology" trilogy, which included:
Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (which encourages readers to listen to the many non-human voices that we are unaccustomed to hearing).
Creaturely Love (which explores the ways in which desire makes us more - and less - than human).
And Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire (which examines the provocative notion that we are running out libidinal energy, along with other planetary resources).
Prior to this, Pettman published, Infinite Distraction, which focuses on social media, arguing that we are being "hyper-modulated" by dominant platforms, like Facebook and Twitter.
Other titles include:
Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines, which examines the cultural co-evolution of humans, animals, and machines, arguing that "humanity" may be one of the world's most significant cases of mistaken identity.
Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology, which explores five case studies concerning the totemic power of the technical image.
And Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age, which presented the possibility that even something as ineffable and seemingly natural as "love" can be considered a social technology (designed to engineer and maximize a specific type of belonging).
In between these titles, Pettman published several "para-academic" books, including:
In Divisible Cities - a creative exercise in cartographic origami, and the reflective result of the narrator’s desire to map hidden cities beneath the familiar Atlas of everyday perception.
Humid, All too Humid - a collection of aphoristic "overheated observations" about contemporary culture and media. (As well as a sequel, entitled The Humid Condition.)
And Metagestures, co-written with Carla Nappi, which explores the use of fiction as a tool to write and think with works of theory.
Earlier in his career, Pettman co-wrote Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object, with Justin Clemens - a work that tagged and pursued various "symbolic objects" which circulate within popular culture and the mediascape, questioning the human hubris of subjectivity.
Pettman's first book, After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion, was based on his dissertation, and explored the intersections between decadence, technology, transgression and apocalyptic rhetoric.
Visit dominicpettman.com for more information.
Degrees Held
PhD, University of Melbourne
Recent Publications
Books
Sad Planets [with Eugene Thacker] (Polity, 2024)
Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire (Polity, 2021)
The Humid Condition (Punctum, 2020)
Metagestures [with Carla Nappi] (Punctum, 2019)
Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human (Minnesota, 2017)
Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Stanford, 2017)
Infinite Distraction (Polity, 2016)
Humid, All too Humid (Punctum, 2016)
Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zero Books, 2013)
Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (2011, Posthumanities Series, University of Minnesota Press)
Love and Other Technologies (Fordham, 2006)
Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object [with Justin Clemens] (AUP, 2004)
After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (SUNY, 2002)
Articles and Book Chapters
“Salomé: Dancing the Seven Veils in a Post-Erotic World,” Calibano: The Official Magazine of the Opera Theater of Rome, No.3 Italy, March, 2024.
"Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Some Belated Thoughts on 'Barbenheimer,'" In Media Res, October 16, 2023.
“Fasciastic Architecture: A Conversation Between Qigong and Psychoanalysis,” with Carla Nappi, Capacious Journal, June 2023.
“Gesture and Posthistory,” in Understanding Flusser/Understanding Modernism, edited by Aaron Jaffe and Michael Miller (fBloomsbury, 2021).
“Netflix and Chills: On Digital Distraction During the Global Quarantine,” boundary 2 online, April 29, 2020.
“The Mole and the Serpent: Totemic Approaches to Societies of Control,” Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power. Special Issue on Gilles Deleuze. July 29, 2020.
“The Species Withouth Qualities: Critical Media Theory and the Posthumanities,” boundary 2 online, April 23, 2019.
“Get Thee to a Phalanstery (or How Charles Fourier Can Still Teach Us To Make Lemonade,” Public Domain Review, May 1, 2019.
“20 Theses on Memetic Desire,” in Post-Memes: Seizing The Memes of Production, edited by Alfie Bown and Dan Bristow (Punctum Press, 2019).
“Remember Baudrillard: On the Ecstasies of Posthumous Communication,” Public Seminar, November 2, 2018.
“Animal Affection,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, edited by Lynn Turner and Ron Broglio (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
“Just Another Manic Monad: Of Glass, Bees, and Glass Bees,” Discourse (2017).
“Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Ideas, Otherness, and the New Digital Vectors of Infection,” Social Research International Quarterly (special issue on “Invasive Others,” 2017).
“The Gesture of Photographing,” Thresholds (2017) [with Carla Nappi]
“Love Reconsidered: An Interview with Dominic Pettman,” in The Materiality of Love, eds. Ania Malinowska and Karolina Lebek (Routledge, 2017).
“Animal Affection,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, edited by Lynn Turner and Ron Broglio (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
“Some Remarks on the Legacy of Madame Francine Descartes – First Lady and Historian of the Robocene – on the Occasion of 500 Years Since her Unlawful Watery Execution,” Public Domain Review, Conjectures series, edited by D. Graham Burnett, January 2017.
“A Horse is Being Beaten: On Nietzsche’s Equinimity,” Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-centric Condition, edited by Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Punctum Press, 2016).
“Lulu and the Centaur: Photographic Traces of Creaturely Love,” Necsus (Spring, 2015).
“Electric Caresses: Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou,” Cabinet, no. 50, Fall 2015.
“The Nude in the Library: Playboy and the Card Catalog,” Public Seminar, Nov 27, 2015.
“Pizza Rat: Totem of Our Time,” Public Seminar, October 23, 2015.
“The Screech Within Speech,” Sounding Out, July 16, 2015.
“Wings of Desire,” Cabinet, no. 55, Winter 2015.
“Legislating the Libido: On the New Censorship Laws in the UK,” Public Seminar, December 29, 2014.
“Working Around God: Technology, the Pace of Life, and the Shabbos Elevator,” The Atlantic, Object Lessons Series, June 14, 2014.
“MOOCs: Herding Education to the Slaughterhouse?” Mute magazine, May 23, 2014.
“The Tumblrst Tumbl Ever Tumbld: or, How I found the Angel of History Trapped on the Flypaper of Social Media,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 20, 2014.
"Tolstoy's Bestiary: Animality and Animosity in The Kreutzer Sonata," Angelaki (2013)
“The Orc and the Penguin,” Cabinet, no. 50, Summer 2013.
“So You Think You Can Think: How I Taught a Course on Reality TV by Turning My It Into a Reality TV Competition,” Inside Higher Ed, 26 August 2013.
“The Noble Cabbage: A Review of Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2013.
"Exile from Funland: Flusser and Agamben After the Fall," Journal of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2011)
"Pavlov's Podcast: The Acousmatic Voice in the Age of MP3s," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (The Sense of Sound special double issue), 22.2-3, Summer-Fall, 2011, edited by Rey Chow and James Steintrager).
"After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life," Boundary 2, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer 2010), 133-153.
"Introduction," in Jean Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext(e), 2008)
"Bear Life: Tracing an Opening in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man," Theory and Event Vol 12, No. 2 (2009)
"Love in the Time of Tamagotchi," Theory, Culture, & Society [Special Issue, "Ubiquitous Media"] Vol. 26, No. 2-3 (2009), 189-208.
Research Interests
Posthumanism, critical media theory, Continental Philosophy, cultural studies, digital culture, animal studies, sound studies, environmental humanities, and affect theory.
Portfolio
Personal Website