persisting with brain death in GR

[John.Hamill at vuw.ac.nz]

Tim, of course, is right in kindly pointing out that the 'persistant
vegetative state' is strictly speaking a medical term.  Not that, however, this
medical term has no functional relation for legal discourse...

Persisting with the thought, in relation to Slothrop, the treatment of the body
as a "vegetable" seems to me to be an interesting example of another kind of
transformation which blurs the relation between "life" and "death" as a hoary
old  binary opposition. (In this case the "control" is "outside", which is the
basis of the distinction between pavlovian behaviourism and "ouspenskian
rubbish").  Of the many ways of reading Slothrop's final condition, this
"diagnosis" foregrounds the extent to which we are implicated in reading the 
body and the extent to which the body no longer speaks for itself.  This may be 
one way of the avoiding the mad but groovy mystic
cosmology of swastika's, crossroads, rocket targets. war zones, and Quixote
windmills.  The abitrary imposition of a methodolgy, (somewhats like that
notorious golden mean and the orgasmic GR) foregrounds the extent to which the
reader is given control.  In this instance, the persistant vegetable, becomes a
metaphor which enables murder, if we consider murder to be a point of closure,
but then I suppose we are not, like the counterforce, interested in "Slothrop
qua Slothrop".