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Book Reviews David Wills. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. 350. $49.50cloth; $18.95 paper. If, as David Wills forcefully asserts, and, more important, enacts on its every page, Prosthesis is a prosthesis, if, that is, it offers not just a thesis about the "thing" named in its title but the "thing" itself (which is anything but a thing), then whatever relations it incurs, invites, or initiates ought by that very fact to display this difference. Here, for example, the relation covered by the conventions of the "book review" ought to be displaced or replaced by all the ways in which Prosthesis is not a book (despite its almost too conventional physical appearance), but something other, which is at once less and more: itself a prosthesis that is not an "itself at all, but rather an articulation, a "contrived conjunction of difference" (269). As such a contrived conjunction, which it stages at nine plus one junctures of the space-time discontinuum ("chapters" titled by chronotopes: a place, a date), Prosthesis, generally but not without constant reminders of the throbbing pain attached to the phantom limb, offers "itself to the limbs, the hands, the bodies of those who would read it, i.e., take up its proffered possibilities of movement—relay, excursion, digression, detour—as the chance of "autobiography" within all the known genres of writing . For the signatory of Prosthesis, the movement is given its chance in an articulation of and with that genre known as the critical, theoretical essay: on a painting of Charles Conder, the novels of William Gibson, the writings of Freud, Roussel, Ramus, Ambroise Paré, the films of Peter Greenaway, and finally but always also from the first the thinking of deconstruction through the works of Jacques Derrida. This is but a poor inventory of the richly grafted encounters enacted around those proper names; nevertheless, a compte-rendu of the book might begin and end its task there, adding just enough of an evaluative supplement as seems to fit between the book's performance and the reviewer's competence, but no more than will fit within the strict space allotted. This fitting operation, however, as dictated and bequeathed by all the conventions of a literary-academic space, is precisely what Prosthesis would displace by uncovering it in a singular, always singular fashion. Prosthesis names and performs the fit of what never fits exactly, seamlessly, and therefore without some degree of forcing and the consequent, ineluctable discomfort of the misfit. (Here, for example, there is the discomfort of this illfitting "review.") Yet, from the moment everything is fitted with a prosthetic supplement, as it is from the first word ("Shifting. . .' '), and as soon as we take up the thing in the only terms offered ("Language inaugurates a structure of the prosthetic when the first word projects itself from the body into materiality, or vice versa .. . language is a prosthesis" [300]), then we no longer have a leg to stand on when it comes to distinguishing what fits from what doesn't. Evaluation in these circumstances, unless it has a very high tolerance for the discomfort caused by its unsupportable judgments, will be brought to a limping halt, or rather shifted onto the terrain of "radical recontextualization" thrown down (like a challenge ) by Prosthesis. David Wills recontextualizes on the "model" of his father—but everything is played out here in the limitless "play of artifice" (143) such a model always proposes once the trait to be copied is the recontextualizing, prosthetizing operation itself; not the least challenge thrown down here is to a finally oedipal determination of lack in the relation of modelfather and copying son (see p. 43 for the suggestion that the "prosthetic" complements the "oedipal" but as a parody). Wills's father, it is recalled in the very first words, habitually relied on a few lines of Virgil's Aeneid to relieve, distract, mock, or perhaps simply (?) scan the excruciating rhythms of the pain visited by a phantom limb on the remains of a natural leg (ill-)fitted with a prosthesis. Dutifully or not, the son reads everything he can into his memory of this repeated incantation, fitting it to the joint that...

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