Ciało „żywe” – ciało sprotetyzowane. Perspektywa współczesnej humanistyki antropologia rekonstrukcji
The “Living” Body – the Prosthetic Body. The Perspective of Contemporary Humanities the Anthropology of Reconstruction

Summary/Abstract: An analysis of two studies of cases of bodily war experiences. One of the most important anti-war motion pictures is Johnny Got His Gun (1971), directed by Dalton Trumbo and based on his novel (1939). Due to the loss on the World War I front of his limbs, face, hearing, sight, and smell, the protagonist – a living shell – finds himself in an American hospital where he becomes the object of medical experiments, deprived by physicians of a right to euthanasia. A reference to the story appears in the activity of the American sculptor Anna Coleman Watts Ladd (1878–1939), who under the impact of her wartime experiences established Studio for Portrait-Masks, making prosthetic masks for the disfigured faces of soldiers. By analysing the problem of bodies outfitted with prosthetics, especially artificial faces conceived as tableaux vivants and confronting us with the human and the inhuman, the article deals with the question of power analysed from the perspective of neuroaesthetics, biopolitics, and the anthropology of reconstruction. In this case the author accepted the point of view of Gadamer, who in order to obtain simultaneous perception also from the vantage point of history as art discarded traditional aesthetics in order to indicate a direction of research focused on the manner of the existence of the image as an ontological event, and thus exceeding aesthetic awareness.

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