The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human

Front matter

The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human

The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human defines, conceptualizes, and evaluates the insectile—pertaining to an entomological fascination—in relation to subject formation. The book is driven by a central dynamic between form and formlessness, further staging an investigation of the phenomenon of fascination using Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggesting that the psychodrama of subject formation plays itself out entomologically. The book’s engagement with the insectile—its enactments, cultural dreamwork, fantasy transformations—‘in-forming’ the so-called human subject undertakes a broader deconstruction of said subject and demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation. It tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human will be of interest for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates in film studies, visual culture, popular culture, cultural and literary studies, comparative literature, and critical theory, offering the insectile as new category for theoretical thought.

Fabienne Collignon is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests are critical theory, in particular theories of technology, subject formation, the ‘in-human’. She has published articles in Textual Practice, C-Theory, Journal of American Studies, Orbit, Configurations, New Formations. Her first monograph, Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014 and maps the technological unconscious of the Cold War. From September 2018 to February 2020, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Universität zu Köln, during which time she researched scenes of the insectile.

PART II Informe

5 Othered Form and Insectile Subjectile: Under the Skin Relations of the Third Kind

7 Still Life as Extinction Event 8 Coda: Wolfman, Vienna, Larva

Bibliography Index vi

64 82

101 121 151

187 200

Acknowledgements

I would, above all, like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for their generous grant in support of this project, which enabled me to conduct my research in Germany. The grant made me rediscover the pleasures of research and writing and to combine these pleasures with other passions, too, such as Borussia Dortmund football games (‘Nur der BVB”) and living in Köln and Berlin, in spaces of support and safety, given over to the enjoyment of the No (thank you, Hannah Hoffmann in K and Heather Purcell in B). I would also like to thank the people I worked with at Universität zu Köln, first and foremost Hanjo Berressem, as wellas Roman Bartosch, Sandro Eich, Bärbel Eltschig, Nina Engelhardt, Julia Hoydis and Jonas Nelder; salute the people I met through the Humboldt network, notably Laura Jarmatz and Kathrin Yacavone; and thank Andreas Kahrs, not only for his expertise and reading suggestions on the historical and contemporary German far right and his hair-cutting skills but also for the company (invoking Johannes Ehmann on this note, too) duringthe pandemic, watchingthe otherwise unbearable Geisterspiele. I want to further thank colleagues at the University of Sheffield and elsewhere who read drafts of this project—Matthew Cheeseman, Alex Dunst, Seb Franklin, Michael Kindellan, Rachel Murray, Adam Piette, Sue Vice and Maisha Wester—as well as my PhD students, especially Greg Keenan, Sophie Maxwell, Pete Sands and Rich Woodall, for their inspiration. Finally, I want to extend my profound gratitude to everyone I love in the places I have lived, visited, keep returning to and/or continue to live.

Insectile Subjectile

Scenes of Fascination: I

In Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), the illicit relationship between Wildeve and Eustacia is figured in terms of the trope of the moth propelled into the flame of a candle. This trope, on the one hand, functions as communication signal between Wildeve and Eustacia: to alert her, inside, to his presence by her window outside, Wildeve captures a moth to release it close to a candle’s light source, whereupon the insect burns itself up. On the other, it behaves as metaphor for their fatal attraction to each other, the manoeuvre further pointing to their insensitivity toward (non-human) others. In its plurality of meanings, this means of communication manages to transmit the shock or short circuit of their love affair, the inability to navigate the insistent force of desire:

The heath tonight appeared to be totally deserted: and Wildeve, after looking over Eustacia’s garden gate for some time, with a cigar in his mouth, was tempted by the fascination that emotional smuggling had for his nature to advance towards the window, which was not quite closed, the blind being only partly drawn down. He could see into the room, and Fustacia was sitting there alone. Wildeve contemplated her for a minute, and then retreating into the heath beat the ferns lightly, whereupon moths flew out alarmed. Securing one, he returned to the window, and holding the moth to the chink, opened his hand. The moth made towards the candle upon Eustacia’s table, hovered around it two or three times, and flew into the flame.!

The mechanism at work here is fascination, a phenomenon that structures much of Hardy’s novel (the third section is titled ‘Fascination’), concerning not only Wildeve and Eustacia’s relationship but also the encounter between Clym Yeobright and Eustacia or, more generally, the subject’s relationship to idealised objects. Clym’s face, for example, forms a singular element of attention in the narrative, to the point that it appears as ‘typical countenance of the future’ according to the omniscient narrator, remarking that an observer’s eye is ‘arrested’ by Yeobright’s face not as picture or image but as page, by the language it records.” In the lineaments of Clym’s face, the narrator discerns or projects a trace of the future, in other words, the conditions of possibility of a ‘type’ of subject. Clym’s features are ‘attractive in the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common become attractive in language, and as shapes intrinsically simple become interesting in writing.’ The narrator observes a process of forming, of formless ‘things’ (sounds; shapes) shifting into forms (symbols; language; writing) taking place in Clym’s face which, though ‘page,’ is also an (arresting; fascinating) image. The narrator acknowledges as much by referring to Pheidias’ production of heads, the ‘language’ of their idealised renditions in high classical art.

The scene of fasciation in the novel, as such, spreads beyond its most compelling and tragic evocation, illustrating Wildeve’s orientation towards Eustacia and vice versa. The subsection titled ‘Fascination’ begins with the ‘system’ of Clym’s face and figure, moving through a series of encounters and settings in which the phenomenon takes hold or effect. The metaphor of the moth and its attraction to light—the event of fascination par excellence—frequently exists latently, in a shared glance between Clym and Eustacia coded in terms of a ‘moonlit scene, occurring in broad daylight, ‘common to both’.* Moths are primarily nocturnal creatures travelling by the light of the moon, kept in a precise location in relation to their bodies. The mutual glance (Clym— +-Eustacia) takes place in a field of signification that draws on this behaviour, intimated in one body’s transverse orientation toward the other. In this instance, both bodies, held in the light and gaze of the other, are compelled toward one another, each of them at once moth and moon. The shared glance, the capture in the other’s gaze, constitutes the scene of fascination, in itself demonstrating how the process works to entrance, to lose one’s head and sense of time and place: in an instant, the world disappears.

The nodes of the current project become apparent in The Return of the Native in its constellation of insects (specifically moths), fascination and subjectivity. This constellation has multiple expressions and patterns in and outside the novel, like the conditions of light or of the gaze arresting the subject, caught in a behavioural convergence with moths. The aim of this book is to demonstrate the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation; to do so, it brings together and evaluates a library of writings on, or renditions of, the insectile in relation to the production of subjectivity. The insectile is that which prompts a rethinking of the so-called human subject’s enunciation, figured and unfigured through the phenomenon of fascination. Before, however, mapping this realm of fascination—the main thinkers on this matter are Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot—I want to lay out the other central relation that organises what is to come, all the while keeping the state of fascination in mind, but some way off, at the edges of awareness. One reason for this decentring is to be found in the phenomenon of fascination itself, which leads the I elsewhere, into a dimension where ‘all subjective subsistence seems to get lost, to be absorbed, and to leave the world behind’.’ Another motive for circumventing it here has to do with its consequences for the ego, which is at once formed and deformed by being fascinated: fascination brings the subject into existence at the same time that it is moved outside or beyond itself. The evocation of both form and formlessness pertains to the scene of fascination and, as such, to the constitution of the so-called human subject; this conceptual frame (form; formlessness; fascination) is what drives this investigation. Form and formlessness are interlinked, as are fascination and insects, creatures that fascinate, as if they were manifestations of the gaze itself. In Flights (2018), Olga Tokarczuk writes that an enormous black beetle, whose ‘flawless carapace’ reflects the sky, functions as an ‘odd eye on the ground, not belonging to any body, detached and disinterested’.®

I am using Hardy’s novel to initiate an investigation into the insectile and Un/forms of fascination to rethink the notion of the so-called human subject in-formed, internally formed, by the insectile trace of the other. In a first instance, my methodology brings Jacques Derrida into relation with Lacan: the concept of the insectile arises out of their work. The insectile occurs in Lacanian thought, notably concerning the Ideal-I, the projected image of the subject, and objet a, the dimension of the other’s desire which prompts the subject’s constitution, rendering itself into an imago which assumes the armour of subjectivity. The insectile, further, maps onto the Mobius strip, with which Lacan illustrates the topography of the subject and which in Seminar X: Anxiety (1962-1963) is crawling with ants (Figure 1.1): right from the start of its invocation, the subject is a structure or surface implicated in the insectile. The Möbius strip organises the movements of the insectile as it twists into and out of form: by form, I refer to the Ideal-I, to fictions of armoured subjectivity that emerge according to an entomological imagination. In Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (1987), the German media theorist Vilém Flusser stages a game of reflection between ‘us,’ so-called humans, and a species of octopods difficult to classify: vampyroteuthis infernalis, discovered in the South China Sea, which despite living ‘far apart’ is ‘not entirely alien to us’.” Flusser’s proposal, a fable and metaphorical enterprise, functions to release ‘us’ into the domain of the absolute other and constitutes a process of emancipation, an emergence from one order—vertebrate, linear (‘we think linearly’)—into a molluscan, ‘eccentric’ condition of possibility.’ He thereby seeks to destabilise the genre of the ‘human’ as abyssal, octopodal, and while Flusser’s object of analysis (vampyroteuthis) is not my own, his engagement with the ‘form’ of the ‘human,’ cast into disarray, helps organise my own investigation on said form, intertwined, as it is, with the insectile.

Saying that, there are significant differences between Flusser’s fable and the current project, not only with respect to its studied object. Just because a transformation is taking place as a result of a game of reflection between the I, so-called human subject, and an Other does not mean that the discourse of the ‘human’—an ‘abstract’ citizen, to refer to Lauren Berlant— as the good form is disrupted.’ If the insectile has to do with the enunciation of the so-called human, that ‘in-forming’ enunciation does not necessarily yield a radical politics but can also function as a system of meaning stabilising around an exalted and resplendent phallic subject. I insist, then, on the turns of the insectile, topologically a Mobius strip, as both potentially form-resistant and an absolute mobilisation of the self, a state of things that I trace throughout this study and that can be glimpsed, by way of an example, in Colson Whitehead’s 2009 novel Sag Harbour. The novel follows Benji Cooper, a black teenager spending the summer of 1985 in a village in the Hamptons, working in an ice cream shop called Jonny Waffle. Benji—who generally gets the impression that insects refer to ‘elusive [profundities],’ not least concerning the correlations between them and racialised abjection or dispossession—reflects on fireflies:

A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone. A black bug secret in the night. Such a strange little guy. It materialised, visible to human eyes for brief moments, and then it disappeared. But it got its name from its fake time, people time, when in fact most of its business went on when people couldn’t see it. Its true life was invisible to us but we called it firefly after its fractions. Knowable and fixed for a few seconds, sharing a short segment of its message before it continued on its real mission, unknowable in its true self and course, outside of reach. It was a bad name because it was incomplete—both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn’t. It was both.!°

Benji thinks of the insect in terms of fractions, episodes of visibility and invisibility, ‘fake time’ and ‘true life” knowable and unknowable segments, an entity of two parts drawing half or incomplete words ‘in the air’ by virtue of its existence. I extrapolate Benji’s reflection to include form and formlessness, there between the lines, in those aspects that disappear outside ‘people time’ and so-called human thought, though formlessness does not invariably or automatically shatter language, established norms nor the socio-political and economic order. In ‘The Context of Forms, Seb Franklin shows how formlessness is produced so as to sustain the logic of racial capitalism, establishing form as value and the formless as racialised abjection to be captured, exploited and discarded." This conceptualisation of form and formlessness, as it pertains to subject formation and representation as well as to social and political life, structures what is to come, thereby also staging a critique of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of becoming developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

Any investigation of (ostensible) becoming-other has to refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The insectile, as concept and process, cites becoming-insect but remains vigilant as to its operations. The ‘scandal’ of this vigilance involves Lacan, brought into play to think through the movements between formless assemblages and the Ideal-I. This point de rencontre, between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari, is set up through Derrida, the idea of the missed encounter and his practice of reading, writing and interpretation as itself insectile, parasitic.

Lacan’s thinking is central to this book: his work unlocks the overlooked centrality of the insectile in theories of the subject and allows us to conceptualise the insectile in its turns between form and formlessness. Lacanian psychoanalysis is something few posthumanities scholars are willing to contemplate, thereby failing to notice the precarity of the so-called human subject at the moment it is called into being; missing the connections between entomology, fascination and subjectivity; replicating and perpetuating models of thought forbidding the encounter between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. By using Derrida’s work, we can, however, imagine other encounters between these thinkers and thereby show how Lacanian subject formation locates the insectile—as in-forming posthumanism—right at the ‘heart’ of the subject.

The book’s argument moves through the insectile implications of the so-called human and the changing, rather than ontological, states of form and formlessness; its aims are to contribute to debates about an ‘in-forming’ posthumanism and to follow the (political) dimensions of the posthuman in its insectile ‘forms’. The theoretical material accumulates in this introduction, occasionally referring to other cultural texts—the insectile, after all, hosts multitudes—all the while structuring the remaining chapters, revolving around the event of fascination and constructions of form and formlessness through the ‘unholy’ alliance of Lacan with Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than unholy, though, this alliance is under-theorized. Anti-Oedipus, written in 1968 and published in 1972, for example, is as much a ‘work of psychoanalysis,’ according to Dagmar Herzog, than a critique of a particular psychoanalytic practice taking place in a Cold War context that, above all in the US, severed the relationship between the subject and social structures.'? In this vein, the argument below performs that which is long overdue: to put Lacan to work with Deleuze and Guattari. Iterations of the insectile—often arriving unexpectedly, incidentally—emerge at the margins of texts on the face of it concerned with other matters, alighting somewhere before passing out of view. At times, I arrest these moments, like in Chapter 5 on Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013); elsewhere, in Chapter 4 on The Shining (novel 1977, film 1980), the insectile constitutes the largely unremarked upon but allencompassing environment of the Overlook Hotel. More instances or encounters, not discussed at any great length, form part of the fabric of this study: textual aggregation as insect collection. In Flights, Tokarczuk describes a professor’s enormous, verging on monstrous, knowledge of Greece, writing that it is made up of quotes, references, citations, painstakingly deciphered words on chipped vases, drawings not entirely intelligible, dig sites, paraphrases in later writings, ashes, correspondences and concordances. There was something inhuman in all this—to be able to fit all that knowledge in himself, the professor must have needed to perform some special biological procedure, permitting it to grow into his tissues, opening his body to it and becoming hybrid.'?

Intimations of the post- or inhuman, iterations of the insectile: texts enter the skin, opening up bodies to a becoming-other. The writing, in this book, is similarly rhizomatic, a metamorphosing tissue-growth or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, a little machine involving inside and outwith, alert to the ways in which the insectile swarms and is assembled within literary and cultural texts. The introduction locates the insectile in Lacanian thought and explores the ‘aporia’ between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari to rethink the notion of the so-called human subject. Roughly divided up into two thematic parts, the introduction covers form and formlessness in the first part (beginning with the subsection ‘Informe and Ideal-I’) and ideas of fascination in the second part (‘Scenes of Fascination: II’). The material to be considered in the remaining chapters tracks the insectile—its concerns with form and formlessness as elements of fascination with either one or both of those operations—across the archives of psychoanalysis, 17th-century painting, novels from the 19th century to the present, and post-1970s film. The readings—a mode of interpretation that combines close reading, the interiority of texts, with an associative, if you wish parasitic, imagination—seek to draw out the insectile in its in-forming role in the production and deconstruction of the subject.

Informe and Ideal-I

The Return of the Native famously begins with a curious perspective, which might be traced back to a furze-cutter mentioned in the opening pages or to a similarly marginal presence—Diggory Venn, the reddleman, an extinct figure linked to the dodo— who barely registers on the ‘face’ of the heath, an enigmatic space sending out its own elusive gaze. Anna Feuerstein argues that both Venn and Clym Yeobright ‘most full embody Hardy’s ecological ethic,’ moving beyond the bounded form of the so-called human subject to encompass more-than-human perspectives. '4 These emerge in the function of the subject as insect, in terms of being ‘lowered’ from ‘the vertical to the horizontal, to borrow Yve-Alain Bois’s words, relinquishing the hierarchy (and sight) of the so-called human.

In Hardy’s novel, this operation, proceeding from Clym’s ‘morbid sensitivity to light,’ takes the form of a ‘daily life’ of a ‘microscopic sort’:

his whole world being limited to a circuit of a few feet from his person. His familiars were creeping and winged things, and they seemed to enroll him in their band. Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate air, and tugged at the heath and furze-flowers at his side in such numbers as to weigh them down to the sod. The strange ambercoloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down. Tribes of emerald-green grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskilful acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man.'®

Rather than morbid, Clym’s sensitivity to light prompts a responsiveness to, and intimacy with, ‘creeping and winged things, reconfigured as ‘familiars.’ Their little lives affect his own, the circumference of his activities comparable to that of a parasite, Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth ‘fret[ting] a garment’.'” Even though ‘man’ is still at the centre of these observations—the circuit emanates from there—the phallic subject is clearly dissipating, as if degrading, morphing into other ways of being in the world.

Clym’s responsiveness and attention, prompted by blindness, are linked to the dismantling of ideological systems of verticality, that is, the normatively organised subject and its (ableist, speciesist) culture. A disability and animal studies perspective might recognise Clym’s shift in terms of a ‘valuing of otherness’ to be traced back to the deconstruction of the phallic; his involvement with creatures he now considers his familiars indicative of a differently aligned subjectivity, immersed in an interspecies relationality.!8 Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers call this new dynamic, between an involved and distributed subject and its encounters with others, be they animal or plant (their work is on the constellation between plant and insect, subject and other), an ‘affective’ and ‘effusive’ ecology, in which there is ‘never a passive or empty space between bodies’.!? While I take issue with, and am surprised by, Hustak and Myers’s coding of passivity—despite their politics, passivity appears as if in a patriarchal framework—they are effectively describing a milieu of fascination without naming it so: an affective ecology is an ‘ecology of mimetic becomings, 2° in other words, of the ‘opaque, empty opening’ of the force of fascination.2! In Hardy’s novel, the empty, passive space—used in

Blanchot’s sense, as space of potentiality—is vibrantly alive, Clym’s immediate surroundings an ‘effusive ecology’ of colour and noise, the latter a phenomenon without boundaries, an ‘aggregate’ without form.” Michel Serres explains that noise is not even a phenomenon, considering that the term implies an emergence out of something else, is a ‘thing that appears, according to the OED. Serres’s approach resonates with the hum described in the cited passage above: eternal, constant, it is usually unremarked upon and, in its ‘no-thing-ness, is constitutive of the ‘ground of our being’.?? The horizontality or horizontalisation of the subject is indexed to the insectile here, a dimension that is concurrently microscopic and enormous, exceeding and dissolving ‘man’s’ form.

The vocabulary I deploy (dissipation, diminishing, degrading, etc.) gives the impression of an exclusively negative operation, but its announcement or promise of an undoing is to be understood as an ‘affirmative exigency, in Derrida’s words,?* motivated by the possibility of justice and hospitality (also used in the Derridean sense). The phallic subject is a thing to be urgently undone—one origin point of such deconstructions is canonical psychoanalysis—and what I propose here is a further attempt to keep undoing it: again, still, relentlessly. My study is, as such, an anti-fascist intervention, bearing in mind the correspondences between fascist and phallic symbolisations and subjectivities, the fetishization of das Aufrechte, the upright and rigid, to stand up and stand erect. In the documentary film Kleine Germanen (2019), the German far-right publisher Götz Kubitschek and his wife Ellen Kositza speak about raising their kids to be aufrecht, referring at once to the spine and to an unbending, iron will: to face the other without accommodation, without welcome. The verticality of the fascist imagination structures itself according to hallucinated but no less systematically upheld oppositions between form and Unform, proper and improper, sovereign subject and abject other, what Georges Bataille refers to as the informe: that which ‘does not, in any sense whatever, possess rights, and everywhere gets crushed like a spider or an earthworm.’? Patrick Crowley and Paul Hegarty distinguish between the formless or informe and formlessness, noting that the latter is a state, something that lies forever outside of form, whereas the informe or formless is a process.” I do not share their view and will not reproduce their interpretation of formlessness as ontological condition. The conceptualisation of formlessness, like its adjective and as already mentioned above, is determined through specific sociohistorical and political coordinates that do not remain unchanged. Formlessness, informe, Unform are not eternal but contingent, and I use these terms indistinguishably. Though neither of the life ‘forms’ Bataille mentions is categorized as an insect, their existence—creatures not bestowed with any value—can nonetheless be approached according to what I call the insectile.

I derive the word and operations of the insectile from Derrida’s discussion on the problematics of the subject, invariably held in suspension between inverted commas in ‘Eating Well.’ In this interview, he proposes to ‘rearrange’ the subject so that it ‘no longer dominates from the centre’ and suggests describing it as ‘subjectile’ to record the jet of différance, the dehiscence that exists at its heart.28 Jean-Luc Nancy, with whom Derrida is in conversation in this piece, likens the subject’s ‘intrinsic dislocation’ to a ‘murmur, the background noise of the voice of the other which prevents the subject from ever being the ‘author’ of its own manifestation.?? The subject, as such, appears as ‘point of passage,’ on the way to taking its place elsewhere, in the locus of the other, to use Lacanian terminology: it is on the other’s stage that the subject is constituted in the first instance.*° The notation of the subjectile, the -ile affixed to the subject, inspires the deployment of the insectile as something that similarly detaches itself from the noun or concept of an insect. An affix, after all, is an appendage that is mobile, drifts, gestures in other directions, across or beyond the base form of the word, the ‘form’ of an insect, to instead or concurrently encompass certain ‘events’ associated with insects: swarming, hatching, buzzing, squirming, and so on.

This is a project about morphology, specifically about subject formation and entomological fascination, in which the insectile is thought of as different kinds of metaphorical enactment of functions linked to insects or to dreams of insects. The materiality of insect life—this denomination is, of course, shamefully inadequate, considering the huge, and at the same time dangerously falling, variety of such lives—occasionally emerges, and disappears, throughout this study, not least in relation to the process of metamorphosis, which the anatomist Sir William Harvey (1578-1657) perceived as ‘the sudden crystallisation of form from formlessness’.3! Harvey’s interpretation has since been rethought and refined— at any rate, form and formlessness lie in the eye of the beholder—but his reading of the informe, the impure and imperfect and of its ‘sudden’ eruption into form (from his perspective not a process but an event) resonates with this book’s concerns. The ‘event’ of form—changes happen inside, are hidden by the insects’ external exoskeleton—occurs in Benji’s ‘fake time, that incomplete temporality where we see only ‘the results when the old cuticle [of the exoskeleton] is abruptly shed’.** Nicole A. Jacobs has written on that same temporality, ‘people time, and the ensuing limited perspectives regarding bees and the concept of labour in Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Janina Wellmann, concerned with the pictorial representations of metamorphosis from the 17th to the 19th century, argues that the drawings served to try to understand the inner changes, metamorphosis as an epigenetic and gradual process, extending deep beyond ‘fake time’.>3

On a branch, floating in an empty, passive space, the metamorphic stages of a butterfly take place, all at the same time. Maria Sibylla Merian’s illustrations, in Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1706), though not the focus of Wellmann’s article, are frequently unreal, despite their precision, providing impossible vantage points: a blossoming orange tree also already bears fruit; a thin branch too fragile, too unmoored, to hold the orange a caterpillar is approaching. Merian’s drawings attempt to capture insect development, whose very obscenity seems reproduced in these impossible dimensions: materialising a life cycle against a blank, obscure background into which it threatens to be reabsorbed. Egg, caterpillar, pupa, butterfly, an insect’s lifecycle is punctuated by molts, during which a new cuticle is formed and the old one shed, a process termed ecdysis. [...] The span from one ecdysis to the next is termed an instar. In most insects, there is a characteristic number of instars between hatching and metamorphosis, but the decision to begin metamorphosis typically depends on reaching a characteristic species-specific size. Therefore, suboptimal nutrition or injuries or disease might result in the intercalation of additional molts until this size is achieved.*4

An insectile temporality, then—an instar time: layered, palimpsestic, remaindered; a time of intercalation—has to do with moulting, degradation, invagination, developments that hatch ‘entomo-oneirically’ in ‘our’ imagination. Steven Connor mentions ‘entomo-oneirism’ in his book on skin, in relation to fantasies of new corporeal emergences: the skin that splits and is discarded for a different body—more resistant, refreshed, enhanced—to erupt into form.

My investigation, concerning an engagement with a range of formal features pertaining to cultural representations of insectility, does not assign or privilege form but is interested in (fascinated by) the moulting of forms. The insectile’s formal features, as such, refer to the informe as much as to a fetishization of form, what I refer to as total form, derived from Lacan and the German writer and entomologist Ernst Jiinger (1895-1998): a fantasy-subject of absolute density and coherence, epitomised in the coleopteran’s hard exoskeleton. The insectile, consequently, pushes in both directions, the dissipation of the subject and the deliquescence of form as well as its entomo-oneiric resurgence, the terrifying ‘magnificence’ of a subjectivity rendered as unassailable, tight, armoured. In Lacanian terminology, this latter manifestation is an Ideal-I, the ‘imago’ called into (fictional) being during the mirror stage. Imago, of course, is a biological term designating the last stage of an insect’s metamorphosis, in which it attains its final living form. The Ideal-I is the subject’s specular appearance, the moment of its ‘jubilant assumption’ of the total form of its body as imago, the projection and destination of the I as image or (entomo-oneiric) dream.** In Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, the insectile resonates, erupting in his descriptions of the subject’s transformation or, rather, inauguration: