Ana’s Reviews > Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism > Status Update

'Sad politics often come from an exaggerated sense of what we can do by ourselves, individually, which leads to the habit of overburdening ourselves.'

'Capitalism was born from the separation of people from the land, and its first task was to make work independent of the seasons and to lengthen the workday beyond the limits of our endurance.'

'Quite consciously, in its attempt to relocate itself on safer shores, capital is embracing the dream of all religion: the overcoming of all physical boundaries, the reduction of human beings to angel-like creatures, all soul and will.'

'For the thrust of the emerging capitalist class toward the domination and exploitation of nature would have remained a dead letter without the concomitant creation of a new type of individual whose behavior would be as regular, predictable, and controllable as that of the newly discovered natural laws.'

'Conceiving our bodies as primarily discursive also ignores that the human body has powers, needs, desires that have developed in the course of a long process of coevolution with our natural environment and are not easily suppressed...this accumulated structure...has been a powerful limit to the exploitation of labor, which is why capitalism...has struggled to domesticate our body'

'This view of the universe as something living, where everything is interconnected gives power to our struggle. It is an antidote against the cynical view that it is worthless to strive to change the world because "it is too late," "things are too far gone," and we should not get too close to others because we cannot trust them and should think of ourselves first.'

'As the generation of feminists to which I belong has struggled to establish, maternity is not a destiny. But it is also not something to be programmatically avoided, as if it were the cause of women's misery and exploitation...the decision to have a child must also be seen as a refusal to allow capital's planners to decide who is allowed to live and who instead must die or cannot even be born.'

'What threatens us are not only that the machines are taking over, but also that we are becoming like machines.'

'Even without gene editing we are already mutants, capable, for instance, of carrying out our daily lives while aware that catastrophic events are occurring all around us, including the destruction of our ecological environment and the slow death of the many people now living on our streets, whom we daily pass by without much of a thought or an emotion.'

'Indeed, before we celebrate our becoming cyborgs, we should reflect on the social consequences of the mechanization process that we have already undergone.'