Rosalinda Quintieri is a post-doctoral researcher based at the University of Manchester, UK. In her research and writing, photography and visual culture converge with aesthetics, psychoanalysis and an anthropology of technology. Her previous work on the poetics of the object in outsider and contemporary art has appeared in PsicoArt and Prospero’s. She was awarded a President’s Doctoral Scholar Award (2013–2016) to complete her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies, from which this book was born.

"Rosalinda Quintieri’s exciting and timely book promises to revitalize critical analysis in visual culture through her discussion of contemporary modes of techno-scopophilia. Deploying neglected theoretical resources from the ‘late Lacan’ in which objects of extimacy become essential parts of our being, Quintieri’s book engages with and develops the logic of recent photographic work deploying dolls, mannikins and marionettes that break with the Freudian paradigm of the ‘uncanny’. In Quintieri’s analysis the ‘double’ no longer simply provokes a crisis of identity and meaning but opens the way to perverse pleasures of human posterity in which the post-human follows the (an)aesthetic trajectory of the doll."– Scott Wilson, author of Scott Walker and the Song of the One-All-Alone. (Bloomsbury, 2020)

• Introduction: “Quasi-subjects”: the hypermodern double between flatness and affective excess 1. The modern doppelgänger: enjoyment as subversion 2. Enjoy (you must)!: Olivier Rebufa and Barbie’s dreamlife 3. Silicone Love: photography as de-Realisation 4. Laurie Simmons: pictures beyond the gaze 5. Lars and the Real Girl: a tale of the New Father Conclusions: doubles beyond the uncanny

Rosalinda Quintieri is a post-doctoral researcher based at the University of Manchester, UK. In her research and writing, photography and visual culture converge with aesthetics, psychoanalysis and an anthropology of technology. Her previous work on the poetics of the object in outsider and contemporary art has appeared in PsicoArt and Prospero’s. She was awarded a President’s Doctoral Scholar Award (2013–2016) to complete her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies, from which this book was born.

"Rosalinda Quintieri’s exciting and timely book promises to revitalize critical analysis in visual culture through her discussion of contemporary modes of techno-scopophilia. Deploying neglected theoretical resources from the ‘late Lacan’ in which objects of extimacy become essential parts of our being, Quintieri’s book engages with and develops the logic of recent photographic work deploying dolls, mannikins and marionettes that break with the Freudian paradigm of the ‘uncanny’. In Quintieri’s analysis the ‘double’ no longer simply provokes a crisis of identity and meaning but opens the way to perverse pleasures of human posterity in which the post-human follows the (an)aesthetic trajectory of the doll."– Scott Wilson, author of Scott Walker and the Song of the One-All-Alone. (Bloomsbury, 2020)

• Introduction: “Quasi-subjects”: the hypermodern double between flatness and affective excess 1. The modern doppelgänger: enjoyment as subversion 2. Enjoy (you must)!: Olivier Rebufa and Barbie’s dreamlife 3. Silicone Love: photography as de-Realisation 4. Laurie Simmons: pictures beyond the gaze 5. Lars and the Real Girl: a tale of the New Father Conclusions: doubles beyond the uncanny