" The real body. To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten. The humiliation in incarnation: to become bread. To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death." Love's Body. 169. This then is the destiny of mybody, but there is this persistent fantasy that I will somehow enjoy the debacle; that myself and mybody are not identical.

Mybody and myself are not opposite poles of a unified pair, but rather analogs. I can look at mybody as a map of myself as a map of mybody. Myself gives mybody an aura of personality; mybody gives myself substance. Mybody extends myself into the real, that is, into a temporal three-dimensional space. Mybody is, as it were, the technology of myself.

I am unable to locate myself in this three-dimensional world except by attaching myself to mybody. The personality is composed of metaphors, not concepts; the person is fantastic. The person, him/herself, is two-dimensional, appearing on a flat page or a screen, or, perhaps lying on the surface of the body at times, and at other times becoming detached, and wandering off into the dream.

To take a position is to take its opposite; the contestants become lovers, a married couple. Every avowal I make concerning myself is simultaneously a disavowal of my partner; at minimum there are always four of us. Woman is descriptive of the actual situation; man is inside his lover's womb; there is no man outside his womb, and there is no womb that does not contain a man. To be gendered is to be bi-gendered.

Though bound together till death do us part, there is an irreducible gap between myself and mypartner. My identity is automatically a disavowal of that other to whom I am married. In order to position myself in time/space, I must disavow mypartner. Our identities depend upon the gaps between our positions; it is not possible for me to claim the penis and the vagina simultaneously; to say "I am a man" is to say "I am not a woman."

Identity is necessarily a mis-identification. The bond between the partners is in their mutual disavowal. Master and slave are conceived at once, they are bound together as mother and fetus are bound, as woman and man are bound, as inside and outside and before and after are bound. The situation is both funny and sad, every battle an embrace and every embrace a battle. The solution is in dissolution. There ain't no cure for love and war.