Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismRehab is for QuittersThe injured subject enters rehab. [1] It's the fate of dependency in civil society. It's what Wordsworth loathed about Coleridge: not his opium habit so much as its interminable restitution. But rehab as a way of life isn't much different from "the faith that looks through death." [2] Both submit an injured subject to a higher power. And submission breeds resentment, as for instance Wordsworth's resentment of his friend's perpetual rehab. It was testimony to dependency. The mark of the Abyssinian maid. The taint of the slave. The color of something not quite human? Notes1. Wendy Brown puts it differently, but that's basically her point in States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995). 2. William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" Selected Poems and Prefaces by William Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 190. Navigation |