Metamorphoses

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris.

We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis - of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don't share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life.
 
Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis - the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies - is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it - the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet - the Earth - that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body.
 
By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia's brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.

Acknowledgements
 
Introduction
 
The Continuity of Life
 
The Forms Within Us
 
1. Births
 
Every Self is a Forgetting
 
One and the Same Life
 
Birth and Nature
 
Cosmic Twins
 
Giving Birth, or the Migration of Life
 
Carnival of the Gods
 
The Speech of the Earth
 
Metamorphosis as Destiny
 
Mirror of the World
 
2. Cocoons
 
Transformations
 
Insects
 
Every Living Being is a Chimera
 
A Postnatal Egg
 
Rejuvenations
 
A New Idea of Technics
 
The Metamorphosis of Plants
 
The Cocoon of the World
 
3. Reincarnations
 
Eating and Metamorphosis
 
Being Eaten
 
Reincarnation and the Transmigration of the Self
 
Genetics and Reincarnation
 
The Shadow of the Species
 
4. Migrations
 
Planetary Migration
 
Vehicle Theory
 
The Great Ark
 
Everybody in the House
 
The Domestic Life of Non-Humans
 
Invasions
 
5. Associations
 
The Multispecies City
 
Interspecies Architecture
 
Our Mind is Always in the Bodies of Other Species
 
The End of Wilderness
 
Contemporary Nature
 
Conclusion
 
Bibliography