Veronica Franco vs. Maffio Venier: sex, death, and poetry in Cinquecento Venice

Italica, Fall-Winter, 2006 by Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski

The virtual body is thus not restricted to the configuration of our "natural" bodies, but is in many ways prosthetic. Grosz argues, "the 'natural' body, insofar as there is one, is continually augmented by the products of history and culture, which it readily incorporates into its own intimate space" (38). Everything from sunglasses to automobiles and airplanes extends the corporeal psyche beyond the skin of one's actual body. For her formulation, Grosz sheds light on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, when he discusses the human body and its technological supplements:

   With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or
   sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Motor
   power places gigantic forces at his disposal, which, like his
   muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ship and
   aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by
   means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own
   eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; by
   means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility
   set by the structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he
   has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual
   impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting
   auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he
   possesses of recollection, his memory.

      ... Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When
   he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent, but
   these organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much
   trouble at times. (Freud 90-92; Grosz 38-39)

Grosz builds on the idea of the prosthetic ego as imagined by Freud in order to reformulate the mind/body problem; if the psyche cannot, in a fundamental sense, be separated from the corporeal, if it represents itself to itself and to others as contained or bordered by a series of distorted, highly flexible, and largely fictitious bodies of its own imagining--bodily fantasies founded, above all, on libidinal investments or lack thereof in certain body parts--then the mind/body split is no longer a split. Rather, the dichotomy of mind and body can be reconceived, Grosz suggests, as a Mobius strip of paradoxically intermingled and sometimes indistinguishable surfaces and interiors (36 et passim).

Grosz's reconception of the relation of mind and body opens fields of investigation that are very fruitful for all those interested in the history of the body. Grosz's psychoanalytic model, though not itself an historicized approach to either the body or the psyche, invites one to build on her insights. The early modernist might evaluate, for example, the impact of certain epidemiological developments or technological changes (e.g., syphilis or the plague; guns and artillery, the printing press, modes of contraception) on the virtual body. When were particular tools or "prostheses," in the aforementioned Freudian sense, developed; and above all, how did these changes indelibly mark people's lived and imagined experiences of their bodies during the early modern period?