John Lechte is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Macquarie University, Australia. He has published widely on French thought, particularly the work of Julia Kristeva. He is author of Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and its Digital Future (2013), which includes an analysis of Sartre’s philosophy of the image. His most recent book is The Human: Bare Life and Ways of Life (Bloomsbury, 2018).

• AcknowledgementsNote on the TextIntroduction1. The Meaning and Signification of ‘Medium’2. Revisiting the ‘Medium is the Message’: McLuhan and Medium Specificity3. The Medium as ‘Disappearance’: The Work of Sybille Krämer4. Discourse Networks, Time and Materiality: Kittler, Ernst, Krauss and the ‘Post-Medium’5. Michel Serres and Communication as Medium: Is it Possible?6. Object and Medium: Technics in the Work of Bernard Stiegler7. The Medium and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)8. The Probabilistic Object as Hyperobject and Media SpecificityConclusion: On Whether the Medium is Always TransparentReferencesIndex

Philosophy of the Medium offers a lively and nuanced interrogation of the ongoing viability of the assumptions of medium theory, a leftover from the age of McLuhan, in terms of questions about a medium’s disappearance, transparency, digital dematerialization, objecthood, lack of concreteness and, ultimately, content. This is an important addition to media ontology.