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The epigraph in Knafo and Lo Bosco's book, a quote from Kant, succinctly describes perversion as a tendency towards the crooked: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved” (1). Echoing Kant, one of Knafo's patients recounts that when everyone turns towards something, the patient wishes to turn away, to twist in a direction counter to everyone else, to walk a crooked path. In The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture, Knafo and Lo Bosco contend that technology has facilitated today's culture of perversion, performing a perverse twist that simultaneously dehumanizes people and humanizes objects. Perversion seeks to disrupt order and transcend limits. According to the authors, we have moved from a narcissistic culture to one of perversion wherein technology continues to gratify while it also intensifies our narcissistic and perverse desires. They detail the multifarious ways in which technology permeates our lives, from internet pornography to robots that care for elders and teach autistic children. Technology might be used as a kind of transitional object but one from which we do not transition. Rather, we remain attached to technological objects that supplant human objects. Humans become increasingly objectified in our technologically infused world. In effect, humans dehumanize themselves as they are swept up in modern technicity with its rampant commodification and mechanization. As cyborg and human become increasingly interdependent and their distinctions indiscernible, the authors ask what constitutes the human, and what does human being mean?
The book is divided into two parts, the first of which centres on perversion from a psychoanalytic perspective, and the second part expanding to the social dimensions of perversion. The authors seek to examine both the destructive and generative impacts and potentials of perversion. They begin with an example of a patient who nurtures a be