What is it that draws our focus to the body, and what is it about its nerves, systems, and manners of ordering information that enwraps us? In its biological-physical-mental organization, the body is singular, it is constituted epigenetically. Yet, as an archive of experience and repository of that experience, the body becomes depersonalized. Gender, race, sexuality are not simply individual characteristics but are always shared physical (as well as psychological) characteristics. Viewed socially, bodies meet each other, and are isolated in practice politically. As such, the commonality or community between bodies has become tenuous, even fragile. Today, rather, political orientation must be realized together as Tomšič writes in his essay »Schicksale des Gemeinsamen. Von sensus communis (Gemeinsinn) zu corpus communis (Gemeinkörper).« In it, Tomšič reflects on the fate of the commons in philosophy in the throes of identity, politics, and diverging social histories. Is the idea of a commons/community plausible today, and how can contemporary philosophy reflect critically on the pitfalls and racist tendencies of the Western European philosophical canon? Medically, the body is constantly being observed, measured by a myriad of technical apparatuses so to give the individual a general sense of order and to transmit this individuality. Analogue photography, scopically, archived human anatomy as well as diagnosed its pathologies through the camera. Today, AI has taken over with image analysis. According to the French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous, (female) bodies can also be experienced through writing and e-numerating, as Annika Haas puts forward in her essay »Hélène Cixous’s Textual Bodies in the Archive and Beyond.« This is not unlike the codes, in their interplay of zeros and ones, ›programming‹ gender constructs. Yet, these same codes have the potential to counter the 0 in the sense of nothingness or emptiness with an alternative subjectivation as Katrin Mayer alleges with her video essay »convulsa or the Need for Each Other’s Relay.«

There is no one body, no supreme historical materiality of a corpus. The following contributions examine specific discourses, in certain historical periods, surrounding medical formatting and the medical visibility of bodies. In »Scanning and Seeing Through: Körper, Codes und medizinische Bilder in den künstlerischen Arbeiten von Mariechen Danz und James Richards« Vera Tollmann analyses the gaze on the (ill) body that is implicit in the medical apparatus with its scanners and AI-supported, automatic image recognition services. The depersonalized, abstraction of organs these devices produce not only challenge medicine but are also of interest to artists, to which they can observe the inherent conception of the body. From the United States and medical apartheid, Edna Bonhomme reflects in »Betrayed by One of their Own« on the legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, conducted from 1932 to 1972. In this study, Black male bodies where used as test studies for medical experimentation. Bonhomme delicately, but critically figures the nurse, Eunice, who dubiously procured the men’s consent to be in the study, paradoxically gaining their trust through shared identity and cultural background. In Zofia nierodzińska’s text »Krankenheit als Ereignis,« she tracks the representation of breast cancer in Poland during its transition in the 90s from communism, linking to current patient movements in her curatorial practice. At the core, drawing on Judith Butler, bodies are all constituted by a shared vulnerability. There is no one sick body or individual, but bodies are all commonly open and face illness jointly. Sarah Salavanpour picks up on the image of breast cancer on her in-depth portrait of Iranian, UK-based filmmaker Mania Akbari and Akbari’s autobiographical documentary A Moon for My Father (2019). Salavanpour showcases film as a medium to examine personal and cultural transformation, moreover, situating the gendered body in migration.

In today’s cybernetic systems and times of smartness, all bodies are constituted as data. We can define data as the archive of one’s behavior, its day-to-day interactions, its physical and psychic health. This digital forensics operates without the consent of the subject; in any case, data is extracted as a resource to be used on the commercial market. Vanessa Gravenor compels us to return to the early days of data extraction and biometrics through the police archive. In connection with her research in a war archive in »Feeling Nervous in the Archive,« she short-circuits the archival impulse by turning to its psychic drives. In this pervasive surveillance system where the body is rendered as data, feminist glitching can be a form of dissent, as Ute Kalender proposes in »Feministische Digitalmanifeste als Mikroarchive kommender Körper?« We end with a text by Luzia Cruz, »Shaping Digitized Stories« where the artist uses science fiction to explore cryonics, a speculative science that seeks to eliminate death by overcoming the corporality of the body. Through satire, the author draws attention to the delusions present in this pseudo science, which like 20th century science fiction literature, figures life as endlessly downloadable, reduced to an algorithm, and decoupled from its body.

Psychological injuries can detach themselves from individual subjects, indeed they can ›survive,‹ as traumas can be passed on across generations (transmission). Experiencing war, an accident, or (sexual) violence can become a traumatic experience and develop into a trauma. The injury is not stored in the event itself, but in the nervous system, which thus represents a kind of unconscious archive: a trauma of what has been. Both repression and suppression are reactions to archiving: Hardcoding or softcoding. The archive reveals itself through the skin, in the organs, in states of pain, in depression or delusions, but also in language and images. Furthermore, it is not exclusively subjective, but transindividual. Takeo Marquardt writes in »Bodies, Bound and Unbound: Some Notes on War and Psychic Fragmentation in Wilfred R. Bion’s Papers on Psychosis« on the life and work of Wilfred R. Bion, who himself endured war psychosis from his experience as a soldier in World War I and his work as a psychiatrist in World War II with shell-shocked soldiers in military hospitals in Britain. Marquardt analyses Bion’s writings from the period where individual experience, the group psyche and external experience all pour out into his autobiographical texts into vivid renderings of the psychic life, »sense-memories.« Daniel Suárez’s text »Places of Continuity« rounds of the chapter out with the author’s examination of the aftermaths of paramilitary wreckage on landscapes, bodies, and psyches in Colombia during the 90s.

Physical violence, war, and nuclear material affect the molecular level of the body, attacking it or even destroying it. Over time, the ecological, economical, and health politics change, impacting the body. These impacts leave traces, but they are often deliberately blurred for the public or untraceable. Ulrike Gerhardt focuses on the Uranium mining in the GDR and traces the overlaps of historical secrecy and physical occlusion of the effects of the radioactive metal. »Strahlen aus dem Archiv der DDR-Opposition: Beunruhigende Materie in Sonne Unter Tage (2022)» demonstrates how artistic, filmic research makes these invisible secrets visible. Bodies themselves form archives of radiation through their cell mutation; only symptoms of illness brings the radioactive damage to light. For example, in the particularly memorable case of the Chernobyl disaster which continues to impact generations of families, as Serafima Bresler’s text «Revealing My Invisible Catastrophe« shows. Bresler’s text examines historical and technical data on the nuclear disaster, showing false or manipulated recordings that likewise kept the dangerous effects of radiation a state secret. Likewise, together with radioactivity, Kristina Savutsina reflects this in the text »Tochter eines verstrahlten Patriarchen« [ed. tr. Daughter of a Radioactive Patriarchy]. From an explicitly feminist point of view, it is not only radioactive radiation that contaminates; it is particularly effective when combined with the ›toxic particles of patriarchy.‹ In »Shades of Blue,« Laura Gómez ruminates on the dimensions of pain. To be wounded, woundable, ill, and to experience suffering are experiences that go beyond the individual experience and touch on socio-political constructions. What expressions does this suffering take on between speechlessness, tormented, and ritualized speech? What does being ill mean for the way one sees oneself, which on the one hand includes the way other’s see oneself, and on the other hand can lead to a self-alienating body conception?