Love and Sex in the Age of Capitalist Realism: On Spike Jonze's Her

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is a fi lm about a romantic relationship between a man and an operating system.Using a Lacanian and Žižekian psychoanalytic framework, we interpret this fi lm in the context of what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher has called "capitalist realism."Referring to the Lacanian thesis that "there is no sexual relationship," we discuss the fi lm's unique treatment of our enjoyment of digital technology and how it deals with the parallel deadlocks of the sexual relationship and the work relationship.We address these topics by looking at how Her deals with the sexual relationship, love, work, and fantasy.The premise of the fi lm is original-suited to the zeitgeist of the digital present-and we claim that it reveals important insights about processes of subjectivization. What is Spike Jonze's fi lm Her (2013) about?Is it concerned with the nefarious eff ects of technology, how we are infatuated with our gadgets, our devices, our Wi-Fi, and our technology?Or is it simply an old-fashioned love story, in which one of the lovers just happens to be a computer?These two possibilities suggest two ways we will discuss the fi lm in this article, albeit in very specifi c critical paradigms derived from the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek: the infatuation, we argue, is a symptom of a kind of incommensurability, encapsulated in the Lacanian dictum that "there's no such thing as a sexual relation"; the love story, in turn, is a kind of fantasy, a necessary fantasy that we nonetheless must traverse or transcend.1 That is, fi rst of all, the logic of incommensurability derives precisely from a reading of our infatuation with technology, our "passionate attachments" to devices and connectivity.2 In this