Prosthesis is an experiment in critical writing that both analyses and performs certain questions about the body as an "artificial" construction. The book deals with the mechanical (e.g., a mechanical prosthesis like an artificial leg) in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic - in order to demonstrate how far a supposedly natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds. Cutting across the terrains occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fiction, its impeccable scholarship demonstrates the permeability of the frontiers that define academic regions and delimit a scholarship determined to ascertain, to describe and prescribe, to hold in check and dominate as fields of knowledge what are in fact fields of practice, intervention, and invention.