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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathPostsexual Bodies
 
 
 
 
 

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am. There is no exception to this rule because I am never what I have.» [19]

However, in his theory of the ‹ego as a sack of skin,› Sigmund Freud had already formulated this in a somewhat less spectacular way. Here he followed the development of the linguistic, symbolic ego out of the folds of skin of the body. [20] The English culture theorist Parveen Adams had the Freudian topology in mind when she called the ‹Operation Orlan› an «anamorphosis of space which bears upon sexual difference.» [21] Freud's attempt to explain the structural components of ‹ego, super-ego and id› in a dynamic as well as a topological way makes possible this connection between spatial arrangement and force relations. Because spatial arrangements are founded on basal assumptions. If one of them is not fulfilled, the subject can ‹topple out› of its perceptive framework. Thus interior and exterior must fit, i.e. they have to both exclude and complete each other. The second assumption refers to the ‹how› of this fit; it must you see be isomorphic, i.e. match in a simple way. However, this isomorphism does not make reference to the pair interior/exterior, but rather it also defines

 

the whole list of opposing arrangements which characterize occidental thought: body–mind, essence–appearance, subject–object, male–female, and finally phallic–castrated. If these pairs are subjected to an ‹anamorphotic› [22] procedure it becomes immediately clear that «each term of the pair is not in contradiction to the other term and the extent to which the relations between them, far from conforming a clean-cut isomorphism, are strewn with strange thresholds and hybrid forms.» [23] With Orlan's opening of the skin the ‹interior and exterior› boundary of the body/face is drastically violated, the pretence of depth—therefore a truth under the skin—is destroyed, and thus perceptive balance is disrupted.

This is different in the case of «Strange Days» by Kathryn Bigelow. When Lenny inserts his chip and immediately becomes a girl and the victim of a rape that ends fatally, the spasms and writhing of his body and his stammering are not an expression of his surprise to have landed in ‹another film,› but rather an indication of his being overpowered in the image. Or when one of Lenny's customers suddenly finds himself

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