The age of electronic communication -- it is said -- is the age of the negation of the body. In an interesting and irritating essay, Paul Virilio becomes spokesman for the redeemers of the physical reality of the body. He writes:

Fast means of transportation and the instantaneous communications have zeroed the extension of the world, so that individuals have been forced to become their own territories of exploration and experimentation. Inward, feeding with illusions, accumulating the distance from their sensible body, toward the annihilation of their physicality, their carnality and their biology. The contemporary technological operator, coated with electromagnetic omnipotence, plunged in the insubstantial reality of cyberspace or virtual reality, can forget the 'here' and 'now' and go somewhere else without really going anywhere.

Of course we should analyze and unmask the seductive power of the techno-culture; but can we really state, as Kroker and Virilio seem to do, that the electronic highways, together with the virtual culture, are just sophisticated systems in charge for the dissolution of our body and of the experience of reality?(3)

How many times has the body died? How many times has the body found its resurrection? Modern history seems to suggest that we are ill with the Frankenstein syndrome. In Shelley's tale Frankenstein is a puzzle-man, a creature made of human parts artificially assembled together to perform life. His story inaugurates the modern approach to artificial men (that is, created through science, and not by means of magical procedures). It is this desire of playing God with the flesh, that we can call the Frankenstein syndrome.
A creature fatally sick with Frankenstein syndrome is Andrew, one of the last Asimov's robots. In "The Bicentennial Man" Andrew, originally created to be and remain an assemblage of metal and positronic circuits, wishes to be a man. He explains his ambitious project to Magdescu, the Director of Research at the U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation:

Andrew has already obtained freedom, but he wants more than freedom, more than a free metallic face on a free metallic body; he wants a body made of flesh, he wants an anus and genitalia. He wants to look like a man, to breathe like a man, to defecate like  man. But these accessories won't make of him a man. He knows that a fundamental barrier divides his robotic essence from humanity: death. He can change forever his body, but cannot die; his positronic brain cannot meet the dissolution of the flesh.

Andrew's specular image, complement, and biological antagonist is Sterlac, an Australian performer artist of the age of dissolution of the biological body. He sees his body as a canvas, too, a canvas to be "replanned" by using technology.

Contrarily to what happens to Andrew, Sterlac seems to be affected by what we can call the Olimpia disease. In Hoffmann's tale "Der Sandmann" ("The Sand-man"(6)) Olimpia is Frankenstein's mechanical counterpart, and the prototype of all the robots to come in the age of technical reproduction. She is a creature made of pieces assembled together, too. But she is just a collage of wheels, gears, tubes, pistons, levers, wires and iron parts, and her beauty, her exquisite human features, are only simulations of humanity. In a sense, Sterlac's dream is to become Olimpia's mechanic grandchild. The goal of his delirious, fascinating project is to create a cyber-body, a human-machine hybrid system, "an extended system, able not only to sustain the Self, but also to emphasize its operativity and intelligence."(7)

While crying against the amputated foot stitched to the amputated leg stitched to Frankenstein's body, we wear and use with ease prosthetized devices, artificial limbs, and organs to reshape, according to our new needs and desires and habitats, the inside and the surface of our bodies. We have developed the art of the body and the philosophy of the body and the technology for (of) the body. And we have internalized the attributes and apparatuses we have inserted in and on our bodies, so that we no longer feel them as extensions and intrusions, as something other from us, distant from our skin, from our flesh, from our organs. We've learned to see them at work on us and believe in them, and we feel them as parts of us, as us. What Frankenstein would say if he could take a good look at our natural bodies, if he would want to try to give them a shape, a definition?(8)

We know that each (ap)perceptive act is a social (and linguistic) act; by perceiving any sort of 'object' (and, therefore, by identifying it, categorizing it and recognizing it according to some cultural conventions) we (re)create it. Could the body, our natural body, escape from this constant process of redefinition and reconstruction?