From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Surgery as Covenant
This article covers the 2024 doctoral thesis. For related theological readings, see Apophatic theology and Beach Surgery. For the medical-ethics angle, see Care ethics and Beach Surgery.
A 2024 doctoral thesis by Rebecca Adeyemi arguing that the glitch functions as a covenant—a sacred refusal to complete, a bond of incompleteness that mirrors theological structures of refusal in apophatic (negative) theology across Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions.
Adeyemi reads surgery (concept) as sacrament, but not as healing: rather, as ritualized acknowledgment of a wound that cannot be sutured. Katita's statement there is no surgery to fix what is wrong with mine [heart] becomes not defeat but covenant language—the admission that care is not about cure, but about presence in the presence of the incurable.
The thesis traces how each adaptation—manga, film, theatre, opera, LARP—attempts to resolve the glitch, arguing that successful adaptations refuse resolution while maintaining the cycle as sacred form. She argues that Beach Surgery participates in a genealogy of sacred incompleteness running through Beckett's refusal, Hesse's Glass Bead Game, and Murnane's inland plane.
Central chapters examine covenant theology as a model for understanding adaptation; apophatic theology and the glitch as unknowing; the three temptations (miracle, mystery, authority) as reframing of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor; and medical refusal as ethics. Published open-access via Edinburgh's institutional repository, the thesis has become a key reference in emerging scholarly communities around Beach Surgery, influencing subsequent work on Sacred Incompleteness and The Doctrine of Refusal.