Body, Desire and (Cyber)space

The Web has given rise to new relations at a distance in which not even the prospect of real contact is necessary. Thousands, millions of people are joined in cyberspace but their true condition is one of connected solitude in which the longed-for body is absent even while it lets loose a multiple erotic charge. How can one desire when the Other is a disembodied subject protected by pixels on a screen? Are we submitting to a culture of mirages? To what extent will this phenomenon transform the sphere of human relationships?

In these early years of the twenty-first century a new culture is starting to take shape, one that is now organised around the materially absent body and its irruption in virtual form on the screen. The Web intervenes in the relationship with the Other and brings into being fluid forms of imagination, desire and the different worlds inhabited by the connected subject.