Prosthesis was first published in 1995. This new edition includes a preface by Jacques Derrida, who introduced a presentation of the book at his seminar “Le témoignage” at the École des haute Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, also in 1995. As the author makes clear in the introduction to this new edition, even if he felt the impulse to “domesticate” some of the experimental spirit of the book, he resisted it (p. xvii), and so this new edition is mostly identical to the first.
Derrida points out in his introduction that the book brings together prostheticity with the author’s autobiography in order to build “a history of familial prosthesis” (p. xii). Consequently, the theoretical, the fictional, and the autobiographical are intertwined along with the text. The result is evidently experimental, linking academic writing with autobiographical narrative, literary experimental, and often exhilarating style.
In each chapter Wills analyzes a prosthetic...