Re-imagining Embodiment: Prostheses, Supplements and Boundaries

Abstract

The question of what is at stake in the notion of the corporeal integrity of human beings is one that contemporary somatechnics must increasingly face. The reassuring image of the Cartesian body as the unified, unchanging material base of continuing existence has been radically contested not simply by postconventional modes of theoretical enquiry, but more pragmatically and disturbingly by contemporary bioscientific developments. In one influential response, the explanatory model offered by phenomenology has begun to engage with the affective significance of prostheses, whether conventionally external as with ‘replacements’ for missing limbs, or internal as with donated organs. In uncovering the inherent plasticity of the body and its multiple possibilities of intercorporeality, in incorporating both organic and inorganic non-self matter, such modes of corporeal transformation can comprehensively undo the conventional limits of the embodied self. Calling on my own substantive research into the use of prostheses in the arena of physical disabilities and more specifically in organ transplantation, I offer a rethinking of the problematic through a reading of both Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. In their respective work, the infinitely deferred possibility, and the dis-organisation, of bodily integrity suggest a celebratory re-imaging of the multiple possibilities of corporeal extensiveness.