Photo: Georgie Cooper BDS (Hons) MFDS RCS Eng. MSC
Extraction is dental-speak for an act of extreme violence,
carried out in the name of oral hygiene: a final solution to the
question of what to do about those teeth that cannot be
coordinated into a Colgate-clean utopia.
Afterwards, your mouth feels like a crime scene;
a bloody site of trauma and violation rinsed with
a saline solution.
The sense of loss is palpable: it makes me think of her
and the manner in which I too was extracted like UR6.
Yet Bataille insists that a rotten tooth - even after removal -
continues to function as a sign and provocation, just like an
abandoned shoe within the sphere of love.
