ABSTRACT
Freud echoed a common teleological fantasy of the promises of prostheses by pronouncing: With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. Man has, as it were, become a prosthetic god. This chapter explores Freud's simultaneous embodiment of faulty technology and extreme optimism about technology's promise. It focuses on three overlapping, richly intertwined axes of identity: social, physical ability and disability, and another category that considers identity as a correlate to technology. "Prostheses" are discursive frameworks, as well as material artifacts. The chapter examines the rhetorical ways in which prosthesis encodes disability and the notion that the prosthesis compensates for some sort of physical disability – although this disability may be in relation only to the realm of the possible rather than a handicap in the way in which it is classically conceived.
