Matthew Flisfeder

Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor in the Department 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.”

Dr. Flisfeder's project endeavours to produce a new theory of humanism for theorizing the twin dilemmas of anthropogenic climate change and the displacement of human agency by digital automation and artificial intelligence. This project 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.”