This article aims to analyze the impact of medical visualization technologies on corporality in the context of the culture of the spectacle. The success of such technologies beyond the biomedical field itself should be understood in the context of spectacular visuality. Both spectacular and medical visuality challenge the statue of the corporal real and offer the body's image as the body itself, a body which is both real and virtual. The virtual body is an icon of the culture of the spectacle, in which the image achieves a unique materiality that competes with the materiality of the physical body for the statute of reality. Opposed to this model is our incarnate experience of the unified physical body as the subject of action in the world, involving our senses as a whole and escaping in the mere visual and objectifying grasp of the media and imaging technologies. Thus, the immaterial embodiment of medical technologies is a pseudo-embodiment, in which the substance, the body, is lost.
corporality; medical visualization; culture of the spectacle; fragmentation