Donna J. Haraway QUOTES

1 " From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power. "

― Donna J. Haraway

2 " By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. "

― Donna J. Haraway

3 " All readings are also mis-readings, re-readings, partial readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply there. Just as the world is originally fallen apart, the text is always already enmeshed in contending practices and hopes. "

― Donna J. Haraway , Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

4 " By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.The cyborg is our onthology; it gives us our politics. the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. "

― Donna J. Haraway

5 " Blasphemy has always seemed
to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. "

― Donna J. Haraway

6 " Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. "

― Donna J. Haraway , Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

7 " Grammar is politics by other means. "

― Donna J. Haraway , Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

8 " Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert. [...] Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. [...] Writing, power and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of the mechanism. "

― Donna J. Haraway , Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

9 " Visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find other actively interesting, even or especially others most people already claim to know all too completely, to ask questions that one's interlocutors truly find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one's ability to sense and respond--and to do all this politely! "

― Donna J. Haraway

10 " Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism.

First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut.

The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens ﬁrmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inﬂicted that cruel cut too.

The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too.

I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological ﬂesh and so melds that Great Divide as well. "

― Donna J. Haraway , When Species Meet

11 " The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. "

― Donna J. Haraway

12 " Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile - a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque [...] The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night-dream of post-industrial society. "

― Donna J. Haraway

13 " 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. "

― Donna J. Haraway , Manifesto Cyborg

14 " It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. "

― Donna J. Haraway , Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

15 " Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. "

― Donna J. Haraway

16 " The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. "

― Donna J. Haraway

17 " Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. "

― Donna J. Haraway

18 " Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. "

― Donna J. Haraway

19 " Make Kin Not Babies. "

― Donna J. Haraway , Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

20 " For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender "

― Donna J. Haraway

1
2
3