Cover of the German edition of
Emanuele Coccia's Métamorphoses (2020)
I.
One of the things I like about Coccia's book is that he makes mundane things - like eating - sound strange. Most people having a sandwich for lunch tend not to think of this as "more like an alchemical mystery than a physiological necessity" [a], no matter what the ingredients.
But Emanuele Coccia does, and I admire him for that. It's precisely such a level of craziness which makes him a writer and philosopher. He wants to remind readers of the fact that when they eat a chicken salad they "literally incorporate the bodies of other living things" [87]. And quite right, too!
I think he's wrong, however, to believe that the reason many people choose to overlook or forget this fact is due to a powerful sense of guilt:
"We feel so guilty about this common, banal, everyday, yet miraculous and incomprehensible act that we tend to reduce it to a simple exchange of energy that can be described in terms of pure thermodynamics" [88]
Or, in the case of vegetarians and vegans:
"We feel so guilty about the fact that our lives involve the death of other living beings that we prefer to establish an arbitrary limit, an artificial boundary between living beings that suffer (animals) and those that do not (plants)." [88]
Actually, most people are simply indifferent; they just don't care that they are obliged as heterotrophic beings to life off the lives of other organisms.
Coccia's presumption of guilt is the sign of a moralist who cannot conceive of the fact that most people have no such feeling and don't view food from an ethical perspective (that's why, for example, informing them about the terrible cruelty involved in factory farming has very little effect on their behaviour).
Although, having said that - and if I read Coccia correctly - then he really doesn't want anyone to feel guilty about stuffing plants and animals in their face. For eating is not all about death and it's "a misrepresentation to see the act of eating only as a form of sacrifice and violence" [88]. Eating is the enigmatic transmission of (indeterminate) life - a kind of vitalistic game of pass the parcel and food is "the contemplation of life in its most terrifying universality" [89].
The chicken eats the worm; we eat the chicken; the worm eats us - it is, as Elton and Tim would say, the circle of life. Coccia puts it this way:
"Life goes from body to body, from species to species, never entirely satisfied with the form in which it is found. And that is all eating is: proof that there is only one life, common to all living beings [...] Proof that no barrier of nature, species, or personality can enclose it eternally in one single form, one single species, one single body." [90]
And death? Death is only a metamorphic threshold, so not something we should fear. Nothing really dies, says Coccia, everything is just transformed, recycled, and reincarnated. Like eating, dying is a "universal multispecies encounter" [91] which forms a kind of posthumous community beyond all difference and all borders. (Which is fine, but I don't want to be there when it happens ...)
In sum: as a thanatologist, I'm neither unfamiliar with nor averse to Coccia's line of thinking on the deathly reality of life and the necessity to eat. Indeed, in a post written back in December 2016, entitled Reflections from a Sickbed, I expressed a preference for a traditional Tibetan sky burial when I die.
In other words, I'm quite happy to be fed to the vultures and don't feel it is in any way shameful or degrading for a human corpse to become food. In fact, I don't even think being eaten alive by a pride of lions or a pack of wolves, is the worst way to die - though as I'm not a vore fetishist, I don't erotically desire this to happen.
Learning to accept ourselves as prey or a potential meal is, as Val Plumwood, realised, crucial to the development of a truly radical ecosophy that rejects the hyperseparation of humans from the natural world [b].
II.
One of the things I don't like about Coccia's book is that he makes material processes - like death - sound vitalistic. Carbon atoms, for example, may endlessly pass from one body to another, but carbon atoms are not alive, so it's simply not true to say that "the life that animates our body [...] will migrate elsewhere" [99] when we die, like a little bird flying off [c].
In a sense, I still tend to side with those thinkers who, like Wittgenstein, insist that death is not an event in life and nor is it lived through [d]. Coccia would reject this as a mistaken positing of death as an absolute event and accuse me of dogmatically making a fetish of temporary forms, but there you go. I would rather be accused of doing this - would rather even be guilty of this - than of writing which (at times) veers toward tautological mysticism.
Ultimately, for Coccia even death is just an everyday aspect of the unstoppable dance that is life; whereas for me, following Nietzsche, life is just a rare and unusual way of being dead.
And so, whilst I have myself written a post on atomic reincarnation [click here] which concluded that the living house and reincarnate the carbon atoms of the departed - and that it is in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living - I do not see this as a form of spiritual continuity or psychic transmigration.
It is only due to the conservation of mass, that we can legitimately declare ourselves to be all the names in history and Coccia's insistence that the dead think in us, is an ideal misunderstanding of this point. And whilst every self may be multiple, it is not a spiritual reincarnation of the life force and I really don't think it helps matters to borrow the technical terms of theology to discuss this important topic either [e].
Notes
[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 87. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text.
[b] Val Plumwood (1939-2008) was an Australian philosopher and ecofeminist, known for her work deconstructing anthropocentrism. Her posthumously published book The Eye of the Crocodile, ed. Lorraine Shannon, (ANU E-Press, 2012), details her violent and life-changing encounter with a saltwater crocodile in Kakadu National Park, in February 1985.
Plumwod first described this incident in the essay 'Human vulnerability and the experience of being prey', in Quadrant, 29 (3), (March, 1995), pp. 29-34. Click here to read online in The Aisling Magazine.
Although Coccia mentions Plumwood and the crocodile (pp. 96-98), he informs readers that he primarily developed his idea of reincarnation by way of reflections on the work of the French artist Philippe Parreno. Although he doesn't mention any specific works by the latter, I'm guessing he would have been a big fan of the 2013 exhibition Anywhere, Anywhere Out Of The World. Using sound, image, lights, and the spectral presence of objects, Parreno transformed the monumental space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; turning the building itself into a constantly evolving organism.
[c]
Writing under the influence of Aldo Leopold - whom he describes as "one
of the greatest thinkers of the last century" [102] - Coccia seems to
believe that atoms are, in a sense, alive and that seeing things from
their perspective is philosophically instructive:
"Adopting the point of view of the atom [...] is what makes it possible
to understand and to demonstrate the absolute continuity, both material
and spiritual (subjective), of all life on this planet. [...]
Discontinuity is not ontological (death), but purely modal and formal: X
and Y - Leopold's atoms - change their mode of being, not their
substance." [103]
See Aldo Leopold, A Sad County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, (Oxford University Press, 1949). [d] See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 6.4311.
[e] I know how Coccia would reply to this: he would say I'm one of those who, whilst finding it easy "to imagine the material continuity of the universe", remain "troubled by the idea that this continuity might also apply on a spiritual and speculative level" [104].
That's right: and the reason I find this difficult to accept is because I don't believe in the transmigration of the self and don't believe that "every act of thinking is an exchange of spiritual identity" [107]. Coccia suggests that whenever we utter the phrase cogito, ergo sum we are momentarily allowing "the spirit of Descartes to be reincarnated" [104] in our person. This may be figuratively true, but it's not literally true in the way that the recycling of atoms, or the passing on of genes, is true.
To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here.
To read notes on chapter two ... click here.
To read notes on chapter four ... click here.
To read notes on chapter five ... click here.
