From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Pacemaker as Political Theology
This article documents a scholarly work. For the pacemaker motif in canon, see Leif's three injuries — and the three temptations.
**Dissertation overview:** A comparative study arguing that the pacemaker — Leif's external cardiac regulator — functions across global Beach Surgery adaptations as a **theological symbol of sovereignty refusal**: the heart as the last domain of the body that resists external governance, yet the mechanism that keeps the body alive.
The dissertation traces three philosophical lineages:
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor
The dissertation opens with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, specifically the **Grand Inquisitor parable**, in which Christ returns and is imprisoned by the Church because his freedom threatens institutional order. The Inquisitor argues that humans *prefer* to be governed—they want the three temptations fulfilled: **miracle** (feed them), **mystery** (they need faith, not reason), **authority** (rule absolutely).
The author maps Leif's three injuries to these three temptations:
- **Blindness** ↔ mystery (faith without sight; the knowledge Katita withholds)
- **Cannot walk** ↔ miracle (he is borne up; at climax, the wings lift him, false redemption)
- **Pacemaker** ↔ authority (the sovereign machine that rules his heartbeat; self-governance surrendered)
Critically, the dissertation reads **Katita as the Grand Inquisitor figure**—not cruel, but "fashioning [Leif] in the most surgically strategic of ways." She is the one administering the three temptations, each loop, each cycle. The pacemaker is her instrument.
But a second reading surfaces in Eastern European adaptations: Katita is the **liberator,** and the pacemaker is the *enemy she struggles to remove.* "Breaking the cycle" means **cardiac refusal**—the heart beating on its own terms, or not at all. This ambiguity is load-bearing across the dissertation.
Foucault and Biopolitics
The middle chapters situate the pacemaker within **Foucault's concept of biopolitics**—the state's administration of life itself. The pacemaker is the perfect biopolitical object: a machine that makes biological life *legible* to power. The heart's rhythm becomes a data-point, a frequency, a rate to be modulated.
The dissertation examines how **Persian adaptations** (e.g., Yek Daramān-i Jing) read the pacemaker as a **colonial imposition**: Leif (the West, the engineer) is implanted with a device that turns his heartbeat into a measurable, controlled frequency. Katita's task is not to cure him but to **refuse the measurement itself**—to return the heart to opacity, to the unmeasurable.
South Asian adaptations cited in the dissertation frame the pacemaker as a **caste technology**: the heart-rhythm as a marker of status, purity, life-worth. Bharatanatyam adaptations choreograph the pacemaker's red diode as a rhythm the dancer must refuse to dance to—the body insisting on its own tempo.
Cardiac Theology
The dissertation's final section argues that the pacemaker is fundamentally **theological**: it stages the fundamental political question—**who governs the innermost thing?** The heart, in Christian and Islamic theology, is the seat of intention, conscience, the place God sees. To have that heartbeat ruled by an external machine is to have one's will expropriated.
Across adaptations, the removal of the pacemaker (as in the novel's climax, where Katita removes it) is read variously as:
- **Liberation** (the heart's final freedom)
- **Death** (the body cannot sustain itself)
- **Transfiguration** (the removal triggers the wings, a supernatural eruption)
- **Irony** (the removal changes nothing; another pacemaker awaits next loop)
The dissertation's conclusion: **the pacemaker cannot be removed without destroying its removal.** Every adaptation that stages the pacemaker's removal must also stage its return. The cycle is the pacemaker; the pacemaker is the cycle.
Notable interventions:
- Argues against the single-body reading of Leif/Katita as fused consciousness (the author reads them as **permanently asymmetrical subjects**, one sovereign, one subjected)
- Proposes that "breaking the cycle" is impossible *at the level of the pacemaker*—it can only be broken at the level of **refusal of the very condition of being kept alive**
- Traces the pacemaker across C. W. Smith's wider oeuvre, finding it echoed in *Antinomicity* (the Möbius strip as the pacemaker of consciousness) and the triage ethics of *Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters*
Reception
The dissertation has been cited in 14+ subsequent papers on the three-temptations thesis and has influenced critical interpretation across Middle Eastern and Eastern European film adaptations (2020–present). A Turkish translation appeared in 2021.