Diseased Flesh

“How does the disease perceive us?” (David Cronenberg)

The history of the body: an independent colony of mobilised flesh units, all of which strive toward their own internal secretion, stuffed into small boxes, and thereafter shoved upon alphabetised shelves, labelled “arm”, “leg”, and “skull.” Body parts. Human decay. Micro failure. Now I can see your body as a discoloured emergence, now your presence is framed by an overlapping of altered terrain. Into this network of entwined threads, the question of how the body articulates an experience not wholly registered by the self—not least trauma and death— becomes a privileged one.

Treacherous flesh. I am alone with you and your body has rotted. And yet, nothing has changed. Only the way in which you comport yourself to me. As your body catches up with, so two identities appear to occupy the same space. It is strange: I am with the same body, but that body has been modified through a relapse in the exchange the past and the present. Your body has been seized by something other than yourself, an anonymous agency employing your body as means of expression. Cronenberg:

It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It’s a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate (cited in Rodley, 1997, p. 80).

Diseased flesh. Cronenberg’s account of “flesh undergoing revolution” captures the sense of the body opening itself up as the space in which an alternative history, with its own series of customs, formations, and growth patterns develops. “How does the disease perceive us?” It perceives us as we encounter it between modes of time and memory. The body that has yet to catch up itself, which, as it were, carries its own temporal entrails behind it, marks the moment whereby dis-eased flesh comes into the contact with the representation of the total self in the present. Yet the independent colonies of the body do not reciprocate this desire. Rather, in the “splicing” (to use a very Cronenbergian word) between the dis-eased flesh of the past and the “new flesh” of the present, a mutant is conceived. But a mutant that is not projected from the self as an offspring, but instead contained within the tissue of the body, an interior and anonymous mutant exposed as the reconciliation between the old and the new fails to entirely fuse.