Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera "Children of the Mind with Disposable Bodies" In The Cyborg Handbook; edited by Chris Hables Gray, Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera, and Steven Mentor; New York: Routledge, 1995 (pp. 127-136) In this text, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera examines the historical and social construction of 'self' as a category ranging from the discourse of the French Revolution through contemporary discussions on AI. She associates the advent of individual responsibility directly with material conditions of production and explores how the Cartesian dualism is being reformulated in a post-Fordist system of flexible production. Within this general schema, however, Figueroa-Sarriera focuses her essay as a lengthy analysis of Hans Moravec's infamous book 'Mind Children.' While acknowledging Moravec's challenge to social normalization and the liberatory potential of a 'fragmented and multiple hyper-subjectivity,' she problematizes his abstraction of subjectivity on two fronts. Figueroa-Sarriera criticizes Moravec both for granting a 'magical' agency to machines via metaphors of 'symbiosis' and 'interface,' and for posing the biological body as 'scatological and disposable.' In this way, she displays how Moravec's text is an unfortunate reinscription of the Cartesian dualism, the transcendent self, Darwinian evolution, and progress within the new AI terminology of pattern-identity, plasticity, and functionalism. Rather than succumb to his Nietzschean desire for the uberman, however, Figueroa-Sarriera effectively argues that current technological discourses need to be understood as spaces for struggle, resistance, and 'enunciation.' L.E. Fazen