Wounds and scars function as symbolic surfaces for exchanging bodily signs

Evidence

Each mark, each trace, each scar left on the body is like an artificial invagination, like the scarifications of savages, which are always a vehement response to the absence of the body. Only the wounded body exists symbolically - for itself and for others - “sexual desire” is never anything but the possiblity bodies have of combining and exchanging their signs. Now, the few natural orifices to which one usually attaches sex and sexual activities are nothing next to all the possible wounds, all the artificial orifices (but why “artificial”?), all the breaches through which the body is reversibilized and, like certain topological spaces, no longer knows either interior nor exterior. Sex as we know it is nothing but a minute and specialized definition of all the symbolic and sacrificial practices to which a body can open itself, no longer though nature, but through artifice, through the simulacrum, through the accident. Sex is nothing but this rarefaction of a drive called desire on previously prepared zones. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 372

Categorization

• DEFINE: Baudrillard redefines sex as merely a ‘rarefaction’ of desire, with wounds and scars as the broader symbolic economy of the body.
• XREF: Connects to his broader simulacra thesis and to Ballard’s Crash as a case study in the body-technology interface. — connects to: Narrative repair of wounds mirrors neural repair and sustains it. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 3893; The body becomes an anagram dispersed across wounds and automobile metallurgy — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 365; Recognizing another people’s wounds is a precondition of religious or moral vision — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and…, 371 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: The body opened through artifice and accident parallels the ritual-sacrifice framing in ‘On Sacrifice’ — wounds as symbolic practice rather than organic function.

Broader Connections

• Violence is force that marks and transforms its object #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1817
• Recognizing another people’s wounds is a precondition of religious or moral vision #expands (0.82) — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 371
• Mutilation forces silence and strips the victim of identity #qualifies (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 239