"I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die. But I do recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough, so inadequate but.... Bless me anyway. I want more life."
if I just had the presence of mind and the wherewithal and the chutzpah and the bandwidth and the executive function and the energy and the mental resources and the spoons and the right attitude and the capacity and the gumption and th
been thinking about cyborg theory, and gurathin, and murderbot
works referenced, in order of appearance
Rasper, R. Prototyping Criptical Neural Engineering — Tentatively Cripping Neural Engineering’s Cultural Practices for Cyborg Survival and Flourishing. Nanoethics 16, 35–49 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-021-00405-8
Williams, Damien P., Heavenly Bodies: Why It Matters That Cyborgs Have Always Been About Disability, Mental Health, and Marginalization (June 8, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3401342 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3401342
Kokhot, J. (2025). Overcoming life: Neuralink, cyborgs and the (an)aesthetics of cure. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 23(1), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.1386/tear_00140_1
Kurzman, Steven L. “Presence and Prosthesis: A Response to Nelson and Wright.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2001): 374–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/656681.
Kafer, Alison. "Accessible futures? Disability, feminist and queer theory, and progressive politics." The Claremont Graduate University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2005. 3159642. https://www.proquest.com/docview/305006871, citing Jennifer Gonzalez: Gonzalez, Jennifer. "14. ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research’". Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 264-279. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473668-019
Weise, Jillian. "Common Cyborg." Granta, September 2018. https://granta.com/common-cyborg/
Kafer, Alison. "The Cyborg and the Crip." Feminist, Queer, Crip. 2013. citing Steven Kurzman.
Kurzman, Steven L. "Presence and Prosthesis: A Response to Nelson and Wright." Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2001): 374-87. https://www.jstor.org/stable/656681.
Rasper, R. Prototyping Criptical Neural Engineering — Tentatively Cripping Neural Engineering’s Cultural Practices for Cyborg Survival and Flourishing. Nanoethics 16, 35–49 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-021-00405-8
Crosby, Christina, “Allies and Enemies,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), 206; as cited by Alison Kafer in "The Cyborg and the Crip."
Haraway, Donna J, as cited by Brennan, Dave in A Cyborg's Father: "Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 33. Haraway defines the word [sympoeisis] as “making-with.” Other interpretations include “worldling-with” or “becoming-with.” Haraway also points to M. Beth Dempter’s earlier definition of the word, sympoiesis as “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change” (ibid.)"
Forlano, L. (2017). “Data Rituals in Intimate Infrastructures: Crip Time and the Disabled Cyborg Body as an Epistemic Site of Feminist Science.” Catalyst. Special Issue on Science out of Feminist Theory. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843
A few months before he died, Franz Kafka wrote one of his finest and saddest tales. In ‘The Burrow’, a solitary, mole-like creature has dedicated its life to building an elaborate underground home in order to protect itself from outsiders. ‘I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful,’ the protagonist notes at the outset. Quickly, however, the creature’s confidence begins to wane: how can it know if its defences are working? How can it be certain?
Kafka’s protagonist wants nothing less than complete security, so nothing can be left out of its calculations. In the small world of its burrow, every detail is significant, a possible ‘sign’ of a looming attack. Eventually, the creature begins to hear a noise it believes to be that of an invader. The noise is equally loud wherever it happens to be standing. It would appear, then, to originate within the creature’s own body: the sound, perhaps, of its own heart beating, its own frantic breathing; life happening and ebbing away, while the creature is worrying about something else.
[id screenprint from wikipedia: On 14 February 1779, English explorer Captain James Cook was violently killed as he attempted to kidnap Kalani`Opu'u, the ruling chief (ali'i nui) of the island of Hawaii, after the native Hawaiians had stolen a longboat from Cook's expedition. As Cook and his men attempted to take the chief to his ship, they were confronted by a crowd of Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay seeking to rescue their hostage. The ensuing battle killed Cook and several Royal Marines, as well as several Hawaiians. Kalani'opu'u survived the exchange. end id]
note wikipekia has been edited to say 'killed' instead of 'violently killed' and commandeered instead of stolen
When the tech brings me back, an image already waits on the monitor: a white boob against the blackest black. The boob is filled with white lace, white ribbons, white strips of silk, like my breast is a diva primping herself in a pitch-black dressing room. Or maybe she’s filled with white swirls of smoke that her sultry self would have puffed in the previous century, lipstick staining her cigarette holder. Or maybe I’m just turning her into a diva because here, on the monitor, she’s been turned into a suspicious object, potentially deadly.
Heather Lanier, "Have You Ever: Mammogram Edition"
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