Prosthesis by David Wills (review)

The longing for security of the parental arms is articulated, other than by means of a simple regression, through a sense of the inanimate and of the infirmity that announces the future and the future of death, so it is a nostalgia that is also a mourning, prosthesis is nothing if not that, coming to terms with loss, learning to accommodate a lack, talking forward towards a cure that is also the acknowledgment of death

(p. 128).

Prosthesis was first published in 1995. This new edition includes a preface by Jacques Derrida, who introduced a presentation of the book at his seminar "Le témoignage" at the École des haute Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, also in 1995. As the author makes clear in the introduction to this new edition, even if he felt the impulse to "domesticate" some of the experimental spirit of the book, he resisted it (p. xvii), and so this new edition is mostly identical to the first.

Derrida points out in his introduction that the book brings together prostheticity with the author's autobiography in order to build "a history of familial prosthesis" (p. xii). Consequently, the theoretical, the fictional, and the autobiographical are intertwined along with the text. The result is evidently experimental, linking academic writing with autobiographical narrative, literary experimental, and often exhilarating style.

In each chapter Wills analyzes a prosthetic dimension through the works of authors of such different fields as Charles Conder, William Gibson, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Ambroise Paré, Raymond Roussel, and Jacques Derrida, whilst in the first chapter, he analyzes the biographical origin of his own (prosthetic) writing.

The hypothesis of the book, as Wills states on page xiii, is the very premise of the post-humanities, that is to say, "a theory of the human animal in its relations to technology and a hypothesis according to which the animate in general will have always, from the get-go, been negotiating with the inanimate", or in other words, to conceive of the human-animal as an always-already prosthetic being in order to re-dimension prostheticity as a supposedly "exclusively human capacity" that would position the human above all the living in an ontological hierarchy.

In the first chapter, Wills exposes his own relationship to prostheticity through the history of his father, a father with an amputated limb, and a wooden leg that would bring waves of pain and spasms that the father would go through repeating a line from Virgil as if it were "an incantation" with a soothing effect: "the hoof strikes the dusty plain in a four-footed rhythm" (p. 3). It is in this sense that Derrida talks about Prosthesis as a prosthesis on prosthesis and of writing as a prosthesis for Wills. In the autobiographical passages, always involving his father and his prosthesis, which appear in every chapter in the book, the author adopts a particular style close to a flux of consciousness, using little if any punctuation, and in particular no full stops. This style appears to be performative, which is what grounds and activates Prosthesis—the theoretical reflection and the author's biography.

In fact, Wills evidences how prostheticity is related to the two modes of writing embodied in the book, namely, theory and fiction: "Prosthesis is the writing of my self as a limit to writing—the relation to or limit of both my father's wooden leg and a series of texts. It is the writing of my relation to prosthesis, and its writing switches in and out of a classic analytic mode" (p. 18). The question of writing as always a prosthetic act, because "the 'I' is always prosthetic"—every "I" is traversed and conformed by "the natural and the unnatural" (p. 19), the organic and the inorganic, flesh and steel (or wood)—traverses the whole book in a performative way: The book is a prosthesis (of the author), in the same way as writing is a prosthetic event...