Get Free Shipping on orders over $89
Engineering Desire : Algorithmic Environments and the Promise of Wholeness - Ciano Aydin

Engineering Desire

Algorithmic Environments and the Promise of Wholeness

By: Ciano Aydin

Hardcover | 2 September 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover


$185.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $46.50 with

 or 

Available: 2nd September 2026

Preorder. Will ship when available.

This book develops a Lacanian account of how data-driven technologies restructure desire and reshape subjectivity. Rather than treating algorithmic systems merely as tools of prediction or control, it argues that contemporary technological environments engage the subject at the level of its structural longing for wholeness. By presenting preferences as coherent and knowable, they cultivate the illusion that the divided subject can finally become complete.

Focusing on platforms such as Tinder, the book shows how algorithmic mediation transforms intimacy, recognition, and selfhood, bringing both risks and possibilities. Data-driven systems can obscure the constitutive lack at the heart of subjectivity while also opening spaces to confront it. Against views that frame desire as the pursuit of objects, the author advances a Lacanian perspective in which desire is structured by absence itself and explores how technological design might sustain more singular forms of subject formation.

Bringing Lacanian psychoanalysis into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of technology, Engineering Desire develops a theory of data-driven technologies as lived environments that organize and transform the conditions of desire. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in philosophy of technology, media and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

More in Philosophy

Joyful, Anyway : Finding Delight in Impossible Times - Kate Bowler
How Lucky Am I : A Skeleton's Guide to Living Your Best Life - Christian Watson
The Beginning Comes After the End : Notes on a World of Change - Rebecca Solnit
The Art Of War : Collins Classics - Sun Tzu
Nineteen Eighty-Four : Collins Classics - George Orwell
The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind : 50th Anniversary Edition - Shunryu Suzuki
Collins Classics - The Republic : Collins Classics - Plato
Beginning to Live : The Art of Existential Freedom - Emmy van Deurzen
How To Think Like Socrates : Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life - Donald J. Robertson
The Book of Coffee : A philosophy - Julian Baggini

RRP $32.99

$26.99

18%
OFF
Start With Why : How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action - Simon Sinek