ABSTRACT
Cultural anaesthesia is a reflexive passageway into historical consciousness and representation, as Alain Corbin pointed out when he complained that western history, as written, has no odor. In the mass media cultural anaesthesia takes many forms. Less than two months into Operation Desert Storm the effaced body of the Other reappeared close at hand with the televised beating of Rodney King. Originally visualized outside the prescribed circuits of fact production, this black body broke through the nets of anaesthesia. To critique cultural anaesthesia is not to assume that there can be a one to one correspondence of the senses to external things because that formula is infected with the rationality of objectivism and realism, which historically achieved such perceptual adequations through artifice and fictional supplements. Likewise, in the case of Rodney King, there could and should not be a return to the pristine originary event in-itself.
