The epistolary body of email: presence, disembodiment and the sublime

Staring into the abyss, standing on the edge of the unknown, media historiography is enthralled by rupture. The ecstasy of difference, disjunction and aporia is sublime. Edmund Burke’s (1729–1797) mountain precipice becomes Poststructuralism’s threshold of difference and the ‘horizon of indefinite meaning’ (Spivak 1998, p. lxxvi). Romantic discourse informs the critical practices and socio-technological representations of new communication modalities in the longing for presence, immediacy and intimacy even as critics of humanist paradigms would disavow these concepts. In its fantasy of disembodiment, epistolary rhetorics haunt email relations. Exploring the postal imaginary, this paper maps the narrative of technological development and desire as it is configured within email practice.