Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Prelude: Narrated Time and Non-Narrated Time or Why We Are All Dreaming of the Japanese Clock -- 1. Eighteenth-Century Rationalism and the Search for the Absolutely Real: When Friedrich Bouterwek Invented Virtual Reality -- 2. Posthumanism: The “Autistic Condition?” -- 3. From Civilization to Culture: About the Dreamlike Character of Global Civilization -- 4. Genes and Pixels: Bio-Genetics’ Posthuman Aesthetics of the Virtual -- 5. Posthumanism and “Multi-Realism”: Comparing The Matrix with Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Solaris -- 6. The Aesthetics of Frozen Dreams: Jeff Koons and Mariko Mori -- 7. From Perspective to “All-Unity” or the Narrative of Virtual Cosmology -- 8. What Would Nietzsche have Thought about Virtual Reality? Nietzsche and Cyberpunk -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.

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Is virtual reality the latest grand narrative that humanity has produced? Our civilization is determined by a shift from an “original event” to a virtual “narrative”. This concerns not only virtual reality but also psychoanalysis, gene-technology, and globalization. Psychoanalysis transforms the dream into a narrative and is able to spell out the dream’s symbols. Gene-technology narrates dynamic, self-evolving evolution as a “gene code”. Discourses on “globalization” let the globe appear as once more globalized because reproduced through narrative. Finally, reality itself has come to be narrated in the form of a second reality that is called “virtual”. This book attempts to disentangle the characteristics of human reality and posthuman virtual reality and asks whether it is possible to reconcile both.