Cyborg Manifesto Quotes

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.

Think, for example, about the acceptance of gay marriage or female clergy by the more progressive branches of Christianity. Where did this acceptance originate? Not from reading the Bible, St Augustine or Martin Luther. Rather, it came from reading texts like Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality or Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’.14 Yet Christian true-believers – however progressive – cannot admit to drawing their ethics from Foucault and Haraway. So they go back to the Bible, to St Augustine and to Martin Luther, and make a very thorough search. They read page after page and story after story with the utmost attention, until they finally discover what they need: some maxim, parable or ruling that, if interpreted creatively enough, means God blesses gay marriages and women can be ordained to the priesthood. They then pretend the idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault.

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? –Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

A imagem do ciborgue pode sugerir uma forma de saída do labirinto dos dualismos por meio dos quais temos explicado nossos corpos e nossos instrumentos para nós mesmas. Trata-se do sonho não de uma linguagem comum, mas de uma poderosa e herética heteroglossia. [...] Significa tanto construir quanto destruir máquinas, identidades, categorias, relações, narrativas espaciais. Embora estejam envolvidas, ambas, numa dança em espiral, prefiro ser uma ciborgue a uma deusa.