Cover -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Acknowledgements -- The Postmodern -- Postmodernism: A "Remarkably Scattered Concept" -- The Unsettling Proximity of the Real: -- Courting Inanimateness: The Body Between Life and Death -- The "Dissociated Dance" of the Body-Transducer -- Body and Language: A Missed Encounter -- Desire, the Body, and the Real in V. -- Fetishism, Simulation, and the Horrifying Dance of the Real -- The Voice of the Real -- The Golden Screw and the Site of the Real -- The Other Side of the Skin: The Real as the Reverse of the Body -- Is the Stain Real? The Eye, the Gaze, and Anamorphosis -- Pynchon and Surrealism -- Drive and the -- of Repression -- Repetition, Co-Implication, Double Articulation -- Faraway, So Close: Hyperreal Density and Disappearing Bodies in The Buenos Aires Affair -- The Obscene Siegfried and the Revealed Phallus -- The Missed Encounter of Sex and Representation -- Sex Between Lack and Excess -- Pornography and the Obscene -- Over-Proximity: The Fourth Dimension -- The Fading of the Subject -- The Disappearing Body -- Coda: -- Revisited -- The Body Factor: Language, Corporeality, and Utopia in Il pianeta irritabile -- The Hole in the Face -- Metamorphosis and the Hyperreal -- Moribunds "Between Two Deaths" -- The Aquarium of the Real -- Language, Irony, and the "Two-Way Pull" -- Language Corporealized -- The Irritable Utopia -- The Excremental Language -- The Ending: Becoming Animal? -- "Something Rotten in Law": The Body, The Harrow, and the Perverse Core of the Symbolic.