As I correct the galley proofs for this collection, I cannot imagine how these "acts' might be construed as devoid of presentist concerns, i.e., the notion that they recapture discourses of the past that have now disappeared. Although most of us do not usually think about it, the nerves continue to be prominent everywhere in modern life, aesthetically as well as corporeally, intellectually and practically. The ancient mind-body split, and its attendant binaries, are so profoundly ingrained that we conceive of our waking states — in the morning, during the coffee-break, after lunch, just before bedtime — as pre-eminently "psychological" and therefore as existing apart from our bodies; yet if pressed to the wall about what we really believe, and who we inherently are, most of us will honestly profess to being monists who cannot separate how we "think" from how we "feel" or our cognitive attitudes from our emotional states of being.