Antumbral memory: a psychosomatic Ppenomenon in "Phantom Limb"

Abstract

This chapter examines Phantom Limb, a short animation made by Australian director Alex Grigg, not only to show how this animation illustrates the intersection of memory and corporeality but also to discuss how it problematizes this psychosomatic phenomenon. A phantom limb refers to the sensations that an amputee feels after losing a limb, which, through the intersection of psychic and corporeal experiences, creates the feeling as if the missing limb is still attached to the body. In Grigg’s animation, however, it is not the girl who has undergone the amputation but her partner who experiences a phantom limb, as a ghostly arm that constantly haunts the animated character. In this chapter, I will first look at how Grigg’s animation lucidly exhibits the phenomenon of “proprioceptive memory,” which suggests that the brain internalizes the physical and spatial memories of a specific limb after amputation. Then, by drawing on Jacques Derrida’s conception of “specter” and Nicholas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s formulation of “the phantom,” this chapter argues that the phantom limb is experienced not so much as “being-there of an absence,” but more as a gap “buried within the other” in this animation. Finally, by looking at the phantom limb phenomenon through the celestial metaphors of umbra, penumbra, and antumbra, this chapter proposes that the person who has not lost a limb, but nevertheless feels this loss, experiences what I call antumbral memory: a psychosomatic memory whose spectral shadow is felt in a person while its corporeal source is twice removed from that person.