From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
exegesis
This article discusses exegetical reading practices applied to the Beach Surgery franchise. For the biblical tradition, consult external historical sources.
**Exegesis** in the Beach Surgery canon refers to the interpretive practice of reading, unfolding, and making meaning from the glitch and its consequences across the franchise. Unlike traditional exegesis, which aims to resolve textual ambiguity through careful reading, Beach Surgery exegesis embraces the unjoined seam as generative—each exegetical act (each adaptation, thesis, artwork) produces not resolution but proliferation.
The primary exegetical task is the adaptation's own work: to finish the unfinishable, to join the seam, to resolve what does not compute. Yet each exegetical labour produces a different answer. This contradiction is canonical. Scholars have argued that the glitch itself is the form of the franchise—that exegesis is not work done on the text but work done by the text, using each interpreter as an instrument.
Exegesis becomes recursive: each reading loops back to reshape what is read. The archive itself performs exegesis—it interprets by arranging, by redacting, by setting works in dialogue. In this sense, Surgipelago is not a repository of interpretations but an act of exegesis, perpetually unfinished, asking its readers to complete it while knowing completion may be impossible.