Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an Ethical Reading
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Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

Chapter 1:  Blindness, or What Is This No-Thing We See?
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Dr Michael Kramer writes: “Its value to the amputee is enormous. I am quite certain that no amputee with an artificial lower limb can walk on it satisfactorily until the body-image, in other words the phantom, is incorporated into it.”
Thus the disappearance of a phantom may be disastrous, and its recovery, its reanimation, a matter of urgency.… One such patient, under my care, describes how he must “wake up” his phantom in the mornings…Only then can he put on his prosthesis and walk. 8

It is thus the imagination that allows for the birth of the third term, the phantom-real limb, the limb that is virtual but which treats the symptoms of not only the real (absent) limb, but also the virtual (phantom) limb. It is the imagination that not only bridges the gap between the real and the phantom but more radically allows for the real-virtual, the virtual-real, to exist. In this manner, what cannot be seen can potentially be experienced, be momentarily glimpsed.

However, even though the imagination is the space in which treatment of phantom-limb pain takes place, one can never deny that there is physiological aspect. Even as there must be a forgetting of the fact that the limb is absent, one cannot completely forget the limb as well; if that were so, there would be no memory of its sensation at all. Hence the phantom-limb sensation is neither purely psychological nor physiological. Here, we have to turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and consider his claim that

what has to be understood, then, is how the psychic determining factors and the physiological conditions gear into each other: it is not clear how the imaginary limb, if dependent on physiological conditions and therefore the result of a third person causality, can in another context arise out of the personal history of the patient, his memories, emotions and volitions. 9