Abstract
In the age of postmodernity with its multiple technological interventions into the human body, the reassuring image of a unified, unchanging material base for individual identity is increasingly under pressure. Recently, theorists have begun to engage with the affective significance of the supplement, whether as conventional external prostheses, internal donated organs, or more radically as the inherent cellular complexity of the microbiome. In uncovering the inherent plasticity of the body and its multiple possibilities of concorporeality, in incorporating both organic and inorganic non-self matter, such modes of corporeal transformation can comprehensively undo the conventional limits of individual selfhood and identity. My rethinking of the problematic relies on a reading of both Jacques Derrida’s notion of supplementarity and Gilles Deleuze’s assemblage. In their respective work, the infinitely deferred possibility, and the dis-organisation, of bodily integrity suggest a celebratory re-imaging of the multiple possibilities of corporeal extensiveness and hybrid identities.
