I expect to blog further about Allan Mitchell’s excellent Becoming Human in the near future. For now, I’m tagging this as a “Reading Quote” (clunky, I know). I want to use this space sometimes to transcribe provocative bits of reading I come across as I work on various projects.

I’m particularly struck, so far, by his attention to the dependencies and contingencies inherent to gestation and infancy. We would seem to be born in need of, or enabled for, various prostheses:

Supplementation and mutual dependency go to the heart of the matter of the child, as implied not just in animal husbandry and tool making but also in how humans must learn to walk and talk from the beginning. We may relate such biosocial becomings to Derrida’s treatments of innate insufficiency: here the newborn, requiring the supplements and supports of culture and language, expresses a disability that is a “natural weakness,” leading Derrida to ask, “How is a child possible in general?” Only with an apparatus of culture and technical prostheses does one have a future in human society, and we can specify that it is only thanks to so many nonhuman agencies, instruments, media, and other matters that one can have a life at all. We are natural-born cyborgs. A human neonate ultimately appears to be less like an animal than a derelict and derivative human, which is liable to seem a humiliating, strange sort of condition. One must be licked into shape. (28)

As Mitchell goes on to discuss, there is something “inhumanizing” and “dehumanizing” (33) at the heart of humanity, at least in its origins. We are born dependent, and perhaps continue to be. I think this book (in my reading so far) has a lot to contribute to disability studies.

A lot to chew on here. If you aren’t already, you should be reading this book. If you aren’t convinced yet, read Jeffrey Cohen’s short review.