Emanuele Coccia: Associate Professor at the
École des hautes études en sciences sociales
What kind of man likes the idea of shutting himself up in a cocoon? Well, Emanuele Coccia, certainly seems excited by the thought:
"I've often dreamt of it. [...] Cutting off all relations with the world and giving myself over entirely to the transformative workings of matter. Feeling my soul carving itself out and knitting itself together anew, in a new form." [a]
This sounds a rather solipsistic fantasy to me and, personally, I could think of nothing worse than being cocooned in spun silk.
But Coccia is right, however, to argue that metamorphosis is something greater than a conversion or revolutionary change; the two terms in which men (contra caterpillars) usually think transformation:
"In conversion it is only the subject that changes: their opinions, their attitudes, their way of being are transformed, but the world remains, and must remain, the same. Only a world left untouched by conversion can testify to the transformation. Conversion is often the outcome of an inner journey, full of trials and revelations, long periods of abstinence and asceticism. Such change presupposes absolute and total self-mastery.
Nothing could be further from metamorphosis than a conversion." [47]
As for the second model of change, revolution:
"In this case it is the world that changes; the subject who causes this change and stands surety for the passage from one world to another, cannot themselves be transformed because they are the only witness to the transformation underway." [48]
Thus, in a sense, revolution is "as far removed from metamorphosis as conversion" [49].
So what then is metamorphosis - and what makes it so unique? Well, according to Coccia:
"In metamorphosis, the power that passes through us and transforms us is not a conscious and personal act of will. It comes from elsewere, it is older than the body it shapes, and it operates outside any decision. Above all, there is [...] no negation of a past or a former identity. On the contrary, a metamorphic being is a being that has renounced all ambition to recognize themselves in one face alone." [48]
Unfortunately, whilst that's fine for insects - and Coccia writes a whole section in praise of insects [see pp. 50-54] - we're not metamorphic beings and the only people who renounce all ambition to recognise themselves in one face alone are actors, impressionists, and schizophrenics [b].
Just to be clear: I'm as interested in insects as the next man (unless they happen to be an entomologist). I've even written several posts on our six-legged friends: click here, for example, or here.
But I find it hard to share Coccia's obsession with insect metamorphosis in its various stages and what he terms postnatal eggs (his term for the chrysalis or cocoon built by the larva), even though I do find intriguing his suggestion that to change form "means having the strength to turn one's body into an egg capable of creating and bearing a new identity" [63].
I do worry, however, that this is Coccia's method for reviving the (slightly addled) idea of the mundane egg; a major symbol in creation myths around the world, which even some modern cosmologists have figuratively adopted [c]. The egg, writes Coccia, "is the emblem of the metamorphic state" [63], a line which could have come straight from a theosophical handbook.
More interesting, to me at least, is Coccia's argument that the cocoon-as-postnatal egg must be understood as a question of technics and not simply as something natural or spontaneous; nor as a form of what Ernst Kapp termed Organsprojektion [d]:
"According to Kapp any technical object, any instrument, is merely the projection of an organic structure outside the body, in a perfectly isomorphic relationship. The extension of the organ, its projection out of the anatomical body, makes it possible to correct its defects [...] but above all to humanize the world. Thanks to the organ-projection, thanks to technics, the world becomes an extension of the human body." [72]
As Coccia rightly points out, from this perspective, technics is something Allzumenschliches - as if other organisms couldn't possibly be technologically savvy. He's right also to say that in the idea of technics embodied by the cocoon, "the manipulation of the world becomes something that allows us to cast off our own nature, to change it from within rather than project it outward" [73].
Coccia arrives at the interesting conclusion that every technical object is (potentially at least) a cocoon that enables metamorphosis:
"A computer, a telephone, a hammer, or a bottle are not just extensions of the human body. On the contrary, they are ways of manipulating the world that render possible a change of personal identity, ethologically if not anatomically. Even a book is a cocoon that makes it possible to reformulate one's own mind." [73]
The cocoon, then, for Coccia, is "the paradigm not only of technics, but of being-in-the-world in general" [80]; a kind of transcendental form not only of selfhood, but self-consciousnes, thus proving that "metamorphosis is above all the relationship we have with ourselves" [81] [my emphasis].
I somehow knew Coccia would say that, as he drifts back into a dream state, seeing cocoons everywhere and enjoying the sensation of being encased in "white, soft silk" [84] like a grub. Still, who am I to criticise if, like Samuel Beckett, his preoccupation with the eternally larval allows him to reimagine the human condition [e].
Notes
[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 45. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main body of text.
When Coccia, expanding upon his fantasy of becoming-unrecognisable, describes seeing wings sprout from his body one is reminded of something that Seth Brundle famously said: "I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over and the insect is awake." See David Cronenberg's 1986 film The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle.
[b] I suppose Coccia might argue that insects didn't originally possess the ability to metamorphose either - that this was something that evolved over time. And so perhaps people too, in some distant future, might be able to "condense within the formal plurality of a single individual existence the impulse towards the multiplication of forms", thereby making planetary biodiversity into "a question of personal virtuosity" [50].
It should be pointed out, however, that in the absence of an exoskeleton, it seems highly unlikely that this will ever come to pass outside of fiction, such as Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915) and George Langelaan's 'The Fly' (1957), although maybe certain religious-minded people who believe in reincarnation or metempsychosis might claim that metamorphosis is already a human reality.
[c] Following Edwin Hubble's experimental observations of the
universe's constant expansion in 1929, Georges Lemaître proposed that what he had earlier described as a primeval atom might better be thought of as a cosmic egg, from which the universe had hatched. Understandably, not all physicists welcomed the idea (not least because it created the need for a cosmic chicken).
[d] See Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, (1877), one of the first books on the nature of modern technology by a philosopher. It has recently been translated into English, by Lauren K. Wolfe, as Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, (Minnesota University Press, 2018).
[e] For a prize-winning essay on Beckett's thinking on the eternally larval (as well as what he called the worm-state), see Rachel Murray, 'Vermicular Origins: The Creative Evolution of Samuel Beckett's
Worm', in the Journal of Literature and Science, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2016), pp. 19-35.
See also Murray's fascinating book on the role of insects in modern literature; The Modernist Exoskeleton, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). A revised version of the above essay appears as chapter 4, following on from a chapter on Hilda Doolittle's experimental writings on the cocoon, in which the author contends (in a similar manner to Emanuele Coccia) that the latter not only has a protective function, but allows the self to respond to its surroundings in new ways.
To read my notes on the Introduction and first chapter of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here.
To read notes on chapter three ... click here.
