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• In this conversation I would like you to comment on your thesis expressed now almost twenty years ago in a book that you have edited under the title Body Invaders – Panic Sex in America. But first, let’s start with one generic dilemma: what happens with the language of art and the social relationships in our technologically accelerating society? Is our knowledge of the world equally accelerating or are we already in a state of cognitive aretration?

— Technologically accelerating at the speed of light, social reality is itself in the process of being consumed by the paradoxes of light-space and light-time. Social history is now astrophysics, which implies that a culture moving at light-speed is not exempt from the perturbations of space travel with its black holes, warp jumps, and unexpected ripples in the spacetime fabric. Like the violent rip in the cultural fabric which occurred post-9/11 in which the universe, while continuing to accelerate technologically, began to curve back to its primal origins in anxiety, distrust, and panic. This explains why we can live simultaneously in the much-trumpeted “flat world” of global cybernetic development, while embroiled simultaneously in the most recidivist of fundamentalist religious passions.

Literally, the body of flesh and blood has split in two—part/flesh, part/machine—with no easy reconciliation on the horizon. Cognitively, we may be the first generation to exist as Judith Butler has said "between living and dying," already aware that even the language of the “prohibited” is a constitutive condition for the affirmation of power. Ironically, the theses of Body Invaders have been realized in every detail, with the melancholic result that we live now not so much within bodies which have been invaded, but within the violent social and political membrane of body invasion itself.

If there is such a proliferation of body rhetorics, might not this, too, mean that, like sex before it, the body has now undergone twofold death: the death of the natural body (with a birth of the languages of the social and, before them, the Foucauldian verdict of the "“soul as the prison of the body"); and the death of the discursive body (with the disappearance of the body into Bataille’s general economy of excess)? This would mean that we have entered the scene of panic bodies for the fin-de-millenium. Panic bodies living on (their own) borrowed power; violent, and alternating scenes of surplus energy and perfect inertness; existing psychologically on the edge of fantasy and psychosis; floating sign-systems of the body reexperienced in the form of its own second order simulacra.

• I think that the debate on natural and discursive body can still be considered active, even though I would argue that their death is not a permanent state, rather a recurring event. Therefore, isn’t this floating sign-system of the body more appropriate perspective for the insecurity and instability of contemporary body then its linguistically attractive but socially unacceptable death?

— As Nietzsche meditated in On the Genealogy of Morals, the debate on the natural and discursive body is a purely ‘perspectival’ event, an enigmatic mirror hiding from view the incorporation of the body by the languages of reification, alienation, simulation, and the virtual. The hint of death is everywhere, animated and seductive, but for all that only a resurrection-effect of a culture which only now begins to live. Oscillating wildly between hyper-aesthetics and excremental culture, the body desperately clings to any floating sign: the signs of death, the signs of insecurity and instability, but perhaps also, the signs of a new multiplicity which is struggling to be born, exist, and thrive.

Women’s bodies have always been postmodern because they have always been targets of a power which, inscribing the text of the flesh, seeks to make a feminine identity something interpellated by ideology, constituted by language and the site of a "dissociated ego". Thus, if Woodman’s photographic practice is prophetic of the fact that, when power speaks in the language of the body invader, then the ruins within are also made complicit with the end of the emancipatory project, this may issue from her insight that women’s bodies have always been forced to dwell in the dark infinity of the limit and transgression as serial signs: exchangeable and reversible poles in a power field that can be hyper-subjective because it is also hyper-simulational. Women’s bodies are an inscribed text, this time in skin, not philosophy, a preface to (the impossibility of) transgression.