| Abstract | Abstract As president, Ronald Reagan authorized and legitimated his presidential role through the transformation of materially and symbolically damaged bodies into rejuvenated political subjects and subjectivities. The means for re-membering these bodies politic was the performance of the rites and rights of memory, which, in the Age of Reagan, assumed the form of strategic technologies of government. Much as Reagan's autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, answers the question posed in its title by narrating the transformation of the amputee actor into the wholeness of the political performer, the Reagan presidency constructed its political authority by reconfiguring lost, ailing, and absent bodies as bodies of memory. This process, the article argues, constituted the political imaginary of the Reagan presidency, functioning as the primary means of staging its rites of memory and claiming its rights of memory.
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