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(In)complete Amputation: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Maurice Blanchot

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Amputation in Literature and Film

Part of the book series: Literary Disability Studies ((LIDIST))

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Abstract

This chapter offers a new way of thinking about the condition of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), in which individuals desire to amputate a limb because they feel that it does not belong to their body, by confronting the statements of individuals with BIID with the writings of Maurice Blanchot. The work of Blanchot is concerned with the way in which unity is a construct; it is interested in fragmenting conventional notions of self, other, and language. As Loewy argues, it may thus help create an understanding of the desire for amputation and fragmentation in BIID, linking the desire to control a lack as a means of attaining wholeness (by surgical removal of a body part) to Blanchot’s concern with creating a lack through language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The differences between postmodernism and poststructuralism are vague and abstract, and thus, there are several overlapping ideas, particularly concerning the relationship between physical and linguistic absence. Put simply, however, the difference is that “[p]ostmodern theory became identified with the critique of universal knowledge and foundationalism” (Sarup 132). Poststructuralists, Sarup writes, “want to deconstruct the conceptions by means of which we have so far understood the human” (2). Although I focus on Maurice Blanchot, other poststructuralist theorists that are concerned with absence include Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Lacan. Lacan is particularly of interest because he discusses linguistic absence in relation to the body. For him, the individual is physically and psychically composed of a lack. For more on this see Russell Grigg’s Lacan, Language and Philosophy (2008).

  2. 2.

    I explore the connections between Blanchot’s writings and the concerns of BIID in more depth in my book Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder, where I also discuss Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus.

  3. 3.

    According to Paul Schilder, a body schema is “the immediate experience that there is a unity of the body. […] [It] is the tri-dimensional image everybody has about himself” (11). In the case of BIID, there is a loss of a feeling of unity in one’s body schema.

  4. 4.

    Susan Wendell writes that in the medicalization of disability, “disability is regarded as an individual misfortune […] that medicine can and should treat, cure, or at least prevent” (161).

  5. 5.

    Although Hassan focuses on postmodernism for this text, he also discusses Maurice Blanchot, who is more closely associated with poststructuralism and whose writings are central to this chapter.

  6. 6.

    Sobchack is a cinema and media theorist and cultural critic who incidentally has a prosthetic leg and is thus personally connected to the theoretical ideas in discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

    Monika Loewy

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  1. Monika Loewy
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Northampton Community College, Tannersville, PA, USA

    Erik Grayson

  2. Department of Comparative Literature, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Maren Scheurer

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Loewy, M. (2021). (In)complete Amputation: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Maurice Blanchot. In: Grayson, E., Scheurer, M. (eds) Amputation in Literature and Film. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_13

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