The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future

As stated in our Introduction to 'The Prosthetic Impulse', this co-edited collection recognizes that ‘prosthesis' (an addition or replacement) has become a staple in the armoury of metaphors utilised by authors and artists concerned with general interactions between the body and technology in Modernity. However, 'The Prosthetic Impulse' resists and challenges this ‘metaphorical opportunism’ (David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder) and in so doing re-asserts the specificity of the phenomenological, material, and embodied nature of prosthesis. At the same time, the contributors are wary of dismissing out of hand, the metaphorical potential of prosthesis, since it sets into motion imaginative analyses and interpretations. This volume’s strategy makes it unique. In my chapter ('Drawing Machine: Working through the Materiality of Rauschenberg's Dante and Derrida's Freud'), I recuperate the visual, corporeal and psychic aspects of the graphic by focussing on the ways in which drawing has been elided within Derrida’s philosophical theorizations of writing as prosthesis. I accomplish this by examining how Robert Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings of Dante’s 'Inferno' (1958-60) enable me to rethink Derrida’s work on Freud’s drawing machines. Thus, I reveal the way in which critical theory has subsumed the visual into the textual, and disclose the repression of materiality and the body within modernist formalism.