There is a passage in a text on ideological representations of the body and capital in The Terminator films which describes the first human dissection conducted by white men in the Americas. The dissection was of an indigenous body and held (as with almost all contemporary dissections) in public; part ‘scientific investigation’ part public spectacle. The anatomist took great pains to wrongly identify organs such as the heart as the stomach, going so far as to report that the body had no heart. In doing so the colonialists create a new inhuman morphology, de-humanising and re-sculpting a creature of pure hunger against puritan abstinence, a veracious other.
this has been playing on my mind.
