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DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 94 The previous chapter in this pulp fiction is more abstract yet predictive. In the photographic series Our Home (1974), Grigorescu embodies a constant fluctuation of identity through allegorical poses. He proposes a hybrid of four different subjects: the mo­ther, the child, the man and the woman. Adopting a pose on his back with his hips open, legs and arms levitating, Grigorescu’s stance allegorises two figu­res: a baby just discovering their locomotor skills, becoming aware of their corporeality, only lucid of its fragments, and a mother-to-be in a modern birt­hing position. The fragmentation of these subjects takes place not only on a narrative level – a baby unconscious of its corporeal integrity and a female’s oscillating status between woman and mother – but also on the visual level of the object itself, as we see the referents signified by their other: the man. In this network of relationships, the other is present in a constant state of uncertainty, much like Heisenberg’s particles: never fully determinable, always in motion, always in exchange. In Masculin-Feminin , when Agent-Delegate-Mirror suddenly disappears, Grigorescu’s hand becomes in­fested with the technology responsible for reprodu­cing it: the camera. Morphed with his hand – an eye in his palm – it becomes part of his corporeal move­ment. He traces this monstrous visual object around his body in scanning motions, reproducing the cho­reography exhibited in the first frames of the film. A reading of the body – palpably informed – from the toes upwards refrains from a totalised unity as the movements are shaky and the light impedes an inte­gral observation. The(eye-hand) camera is not the substitute for a creeping voyeur; its glance does not come from hidden corners and peepholes. Almost masturbatory, it is paradoxically exhibitionistic: Gri­gorescu slides it along his entire body in an intimate encounter. He examines himself(themselves?), inter­lacing tactility and visuality. Beyond a commentary on the hierarchy of knowledge, of reason and abs­tract facilities above somatic experience(Paul Nea­gu sends his greetings!) and a critique on the act of understanding film as mere visual experience, Grigo­rescu’s hermaphrodite reveals itself to be a cyborg: an entity surpassing the border between the organic and the machine, not born in a garden and not see­king unitary identity, generating endless antagonis­tic dualisms. 8 And as Donna Haraway states, as we know ourselves in our formal discourses of biology and daily practices,“we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras”. 9 These biotic systems that we have become, that Grigorescu has become, act as communication devices. That which the cyborg communicates, in a polyphonic chorus with a medial architecture that rewrites meaning by clinging to the veridicality of indexicality while shaping, morphing, cutting, layering and fragmenting it beyond its car­cass, is a history of transgression. As“the Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the li­mits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary polluti­ons of the warrior with animality and women[…] and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, por­tents and diseases – all crucial to establishing mo­dern identity”, 10 so does Masculin-Feminin infect the cells of ideological constructs, rewriting them, even if only from the safety of a cupboard. When the eye of the camera departs from Grigore­scu’s hand, it observes him from a distance. Still not a voyeur, this is pure exhibitionism! It observes his gym­nastic-like uncoordinated movements, movements alluding to something between a baby lying on his 8 Cf. D. Haraway,“A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in id., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), 149–181: 180. 9 Haraway,"A Cyborg Manifesto", 177(see n.8). 10 Haraway,"A Cyborg Manifesto", 180(see n.8).