Dominic Pettman, Author at Public Seminar

Interviews

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

A conversation with author Dominic Pettman on how the phenomenon of ghosting is experienced in the modern age

March 26, 2026 • by Mariana Giacobbe Goldberg and Dominic Pettman

Ghosting: when someone just stops replying to messages, stops returning calls, and for all intents and purposes vanishes without warning from your life. The term names the sudden ending of a relationship, through disappearance rather than a clear confrontation or closing act: It describes a mode of withdrawal by absence ...

Ghosting: How Technology Is Changing Our Hope for Connection

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The Existential Status of The Simpsons

Pondering the Homeric Dasein of Springfield

March 11, 2019 • by Dominic Pettman

One of the ongoing jokes on The Simpsons -- which is currently celebrating 30 years on air, as the longest-running primetime scripted series on U.S. television -- is that the viewer is consistently denied knowledge of which state Springfield is located in. In a recent interview with podcaster Marc Maron, Krusty the Klown ...

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Remember Baudrillard

On the Ecstasies of Posthumous Communication

November 2, 2018 • by Dominic Pettman

The last thing I expected was a reply. After all, he was dead. I emailed Jean Baudrillard one intoxicated evening, when the world was feeling too much for me. The idea came to me as a dark whim; somewhere between a compulsion and a negative epiphany. We had exchanged a couple ...

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Creaturely Love

Symposium on Love

May 14, 2018 • by Dominic Pettman

Today I would like to briefly talk about some of the ways I think that love makes us both more and less than human. But first a nutshell version of my understanding of love. Love is a technology (as I have argued in a book called Love and Other Technologies). Indeed, it is ...

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Twenty Theses on Posthumanism, Political Affect, and Proliferation

A Talk Not Given for the Vera List Center, Due to Viral Illness

March 10, 2017 • by Dominic Pettman

The human is the animal that relies on technology in order to realize its humanity. The “post-human” is thus an ontological category, more than a historical one. The very first humans were, from this perspective, as posthuman as we are today. We are ever using tools and prostheses to get ahead ...

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Libidinal Ecology: Sex and the Anthropocene (I)

January 26, 2016 • by Dominic Pettman

In 2013, reports starting circulating in the media that the global best-seller 50 Shades of Grey was beginning to outstay its welcome as a cultural artifact. In the UK alone, it sold 5.3 million copies to that point, even before the film based on the story was released. A large percentage of ...

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The Nude in the Library

A tale of two anachronisms

November 27, 2015 • by Dominic Pettman

October 2015 was a big month for obsolescence. First we heard reports that the OCLC’s classic library card catalog was finally being retired. Then we heard news that Playboy magazine had decided to no longer feature fully nude models between its pages. As someone who grew up taking for granted the existence ...

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Pizza Rat, a Totem of Our Time

Humans, animals, and life in 2015

October 23, 2015 • by Dominic Pettman

For a brief moment in late September, New York City had a new celebrity: Pizza Rat. This furry character -- either endearingly repulsive, or repulsively endearing, depending on your sensibility -- appeared in most of our social media feeds after a quick-fingered commuter snapped ...

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Legislating the Libido

On the UK’s new anti-pornography laws

December 29, 2014 • by Dominic Pettman

It was certainly one of the more unorthodox protests in living memory: red-blooded women straddling the faces of submissive, supine men outside London’s Parliament House. This orgiastic pantomime was prompted by a recent amendment to the UK’s Communications Act of 2003, banning ...