Recognition beyond narcissism
imaging the body's ownness and strangeness
pp. 186-204
in: Helen Fielding, Gabrielle Hiltmann, Dorothea Olkowski, Anne Reichold (eds), The other, Berlin, Springer, 2007Abstract
Currently, we see a mounting theoretical interest in the notion of the body.1 This is not surprising since our society faces a certain number of technological developments and innovations that radically subvert classical categories of the body. One need only think of the global use of the Internet and the increasing possibilities of organ transplants to grasp that these technologies are deeply anchored in our daily lives, and that their impact on the experience and conception of our bodies is enormous. Thanks to the Internet, we can dwell in cyberspace — a place where we no longer need our physical bodies. It frees communication and imagination from bodily presence, and as such, it seriously calls into question the idea of the body as the site of our existence, our experience and our identity. This kind of technological innovation yields new concepts of the body, both in theory and in art. The anthropologist and sociologist David le Breton, for instance, claims that the body can no longer constitute a real ego, but rather an alter ego; the body has become "la prothèse d'un Moi' (Le Breton 24). From an artistic point of view, the Australian artist Stelarc declares that the body is "obsolete'.2