(Polity 2021)
I.
Emanuele Coccia has called his new book Metamorphoses. But he may as well have called it Pantheism, because what this book primarily affirms is the "unity of all living things [...] and the unity of the living being with the matter of the world" [a].
According to Coccia, pantheism is a hidden tradition with a repressed history within philosophy; a claim which, like many others in this book, is one I doubt the veracity of. For it might be argued, that philosophers simply prefer to use the less religious-sounding term monism to describe unity and the peculiar satisfaction that it gives some people to announce that All is One.
Anyway, let's get down to business ...
As well as an Introduction and Conclusion, there are five chapters in this book: Births, Cocoons, Reincarnations, Migrations, and Associations. Here, in part one of the post, I'll discuss the first of these chapters and the Introduction.
II.
Coccia opens his Introduction with a three-word phrase even more provocative than I love you: In the beginning ...
Obviously, he knows this is the opening phrase of the Bible; a translation of the Classical Hebrew expression Bereshith [בְּרֵאשִׁית]. And whilst one hopes he's using it with a certain irony, I do worry that he's preparing the way for a religious narrative to follow.
Anyhoo, in the beginning, says Coccia, "we were all the same living creature, sharing the same body and the same experience" [3]. I suppose that's true enough - banal, but true enough [b]. But we might wish to challenge Coccia's following sentence: "And things haven't changed so much since then." [3]
For this is said as if the new forms and modes of existence which have proliferated in the 3.5 billion years since LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), hardly matter; as if all that really counts is the life force which animates them. For life, clearly, is the essential for Coccia, who, I suspect, would like to write the word with a capital L if he dared.
Coccia challenges his readers to accept the "deepest meaning of the Darwinian theory of evolution" [5] - the one that biologists (allegedly) don't like to think about, as it means regarding species as life games, i.e., "unstable and necessarily ephemeral configurations" [5], rather than substantial entities.
Coccia also wants readers to come to terms with the fact that, as Nietzsche put it, being alive is only a rare and unusal way of being dead:
"There is no opposition between the living and the non-living. Not only is every living creature continuous with the non-living, it is its extension, metamorphosis, and most extreme expression." [5]
Again, that's true enough, but it's nothing very new; thanatologists, including myself, have been pointing this out for years now: click here, for example, to read a post based on an essay from 2006 in which I attempted to dissolve the distinction between life and death.
And, what's more, some of us have also dared to draw the consequences from this fatal truth; we realise that if all life is essentially the same, then a human life has no more inherent value than that of a cockroach [c], and if there is no difference between living things and the world of dead matter, then there's no point crying over species facing extinction, for example.
This - to use Coccia's own phrase - is the deepest meaning of nihilism and why Ray Brassier is right to argue that philosophy's destiny (and duty) is to acknowledge the fact that "thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of the living" [d].
III.
Does Coccia share this view? Maybe. Take a look at this sentence, for example:
"Our adult life form is no more perfect, no more 'us', no more human, no more complete than that of the bicellular embryo that comes directly after the fertilization of the egg ..." [8]
Is Coccia making the metaphysical claim that the soul enters at conception? Is he demanding full rights for the unborn? Or is he suggesting, rather, that it would be fine with him were we to abort human beings at any stage of their development - even long after birth - since each and every form "has the same weight, the same importance, the same value: metamorphosis is the principle of equivalence between all natures" [9].
If all life is just a game of forms played out on the same plane - and that plane is material actuality (i.e. death) - then it makes perfect sense to say that an embryo is the same as a foetus, a foetus is the same as a baby, and a baby is the same as an adult. It just becomes a question of whether you think their value is inestimable or zero.
IV.
Coccia makes a big deal of the fact that, like the rest of us, he was born to parents, who were themselves born of their parents, who were born ... well, you get the idea: "Birth is not simply the emergence of the new, it is also the erratic wandering of the future through a limitless past." [14]
He thinks we are too forgetful of this, although the fact that there's a multibillion dollar birthday industry might suggest otherwise; as might the fact that Happy Birthday to You is the most sung song in the world [e].
Coccia, the proud parent of a young daughter, Colette, to whom he dedicates this book, is clearly still in the flush of first-time fatherhood. Thus it is that everything about pregnancy, birth, and babies seems miraculous and makes him gush to his readers about how special his child is:
"She arrived barely five years ago and she has changed everything around her, and around me: she has lit up worlds through which she has travelled with a joy and a grace I had never before encountered. She knows all the secrets of metamorphosis - and she has revealed a few of them to me." [x]
If that's the case, then one rather wishes that Colette had written the book ... Perhaps if she had, we would've avoided being told in a section entitled 'Birth and Nature' that there is "nothing more universal" [19] than birth; something that makes me as impatient as it made Roland Barthes over sixty years ago.
In 'The Great Family of Man', Barthes demythologises the idea that events such as birth and death can
be understood outside of history:
"Birth, death?
Yes, these are facts of nature, universal facts. But if one removes
History from them, there is nothing more to be said about them;
any comment about them becomes purely tautological. [...] For these
natural facts to gain access to a true language, they must be
inserted into a category of knowledge which means postulating
that one can transform them, and precisely subject their naturalness to [...] criticism. [...] True, children are always born but in the
whole mass of the human problem, what does the 'essence' of this
process matter to us, compared to its modes which [...] are
perfectly historical? Whether or not the child is born with ease or
difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother,
whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or
not such and such a type of future is open to him [...]" [f]
This is the sort of thing that Coccia's book might have usefully reminded us, instead of fobbing us off with lyricism
surrounding the fact of birth: "To be born [...] is to experience being a part of the infinite matter of the world [...] It is always Gaia who says 'I' in us." [21] [g]
To which I can only say kill me now, or let's move on ...
Every now and then, we come to something that might be interpreted as a philosophical statement. For example; "multiplicity is not simply arithmetical, and it does not negate the profound unity [...] of all living beings" [27].
But isn't that just saying what Deleuze and Guattari reduced to a simple equation: Pluralism = Monism [h] ...?
This is the magic formula which Deleuze learns from his readings of Spinoza and Nietzsche and one might have hoped that Coccia would have at least referred to this. But he doesn't. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because he's worried about becoming trapped in "the enclosed courtyard of traditional books, subjects, and arguments, all sanctioned as 'properly philosophical' by an arbitrary and culturally quite limited canon" [i].
Whatever the reason, Coccia seems unwilling to reference Deleuze; even when, later on in the chapter, he meditates on difference and repetition: "We are all a repetition of a past life. [...] Yet in being so expressed, the past is [...] rearranged, arbitrarily reconstituted, transfigured." [34]
I would've thought this was the perfect opportunity to at least mention Deleuze's powerful critique of representation; one that develops concepts of difference and repetition that are metaphysically prior to any concept of identity [j].
Instead, Coccia chooses to discuss the symbolic theory of Sándor Ferenczi - "one of Freud's most brilliant and heterodox students" [34] - who offers such astonishing insights as this: "there is a 'symbolic identity of the womb with the sea and the earth on the one hand, and of the male member with the child and the fish on the other'" [36] [k].
I've said it before - and I very much suspect I'll be forced to say it again whilst reading this book - kill me now!
Notes
[a] Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay, (Polity Press, 2021), p. viii. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the post.
[b] Coccia's opening reminds me of D. H. Lawrence's Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in which he writes: "In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering and its life-pulse throbbing." See Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 69.
[c] This is not say that you can't value a human life above that of a cockroach, only that this is a matter of personal preference (or prejudice) and has no real foundation as the same life flows through both. The case of Gregor Samsor is obviously instructive here: click here for my take on Kafka's story.
Later, in a section entitled 'Metamorphosis as Destiny', Coccia again says something that potentially has fatal consequences; namely, that every metamorphic being "is composed and inhabited by [an] otherness, which can never be erased" [38]. If that's the case - if we carry within us everyone and everything, including all other peoples and all other species, then why does it matter if we exterminate them?
In some ways, Coccia reminds me of Walt Whitman who has, as D. H. Lawrence would say, broken the mainspring of his own singular being and now asserts: I am everything and everything is me! as he attempts to become in his own person "the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time". He cannot accept that outside the egg of his Allness, there is genuine otherness, which he is not and cannot become. See the final version (1923) of Lawrence's essay 'Whitman', in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 148-161. The line quoted above is on p. 151.
[d] Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. xi.
[e] Later in the chapter, Coccia writes: "Our society is still based on the cult of the dead [...] Birth, on the other hand, remains a mystery and a taboo. [...] We barely talk about it or celebrate it [...]" [25]. This, however, is patently not true; a friend of mine has just had a baby and she never shuts up about the fact, both in person and on social media. And whilst Christian culture attaches great importance to the death of Christ, do we not also celebrate Christmas and Easter - his birth and resurrection?
To be fair, Coccia, concedes that Christ's nativity is a familiar theme in European art, but argues that what is depicted "is no ordinary birth, but a unique, one-off, unnatural event" [30]. In other words, Christian theology places the birth of Christ outside of any naturalistic framework in order to emphasise its miraculous character.
Like Nietzsche, who also holds Christianity responsible for throwing filth on the actual origins of life, Coccia argues that we need to liberate ourselves from "this two-thousand-year-old legacy" [32] and reverse its central teachings. However, whereas for Nietzsche this involves reviving the Dionysian mysteries, in order to ensure that every aspect of procreation, pregnancy, and birth awakens the most exalted and solemn feelings, for Coccia, we would do better to imagine that, if God participates in birth, then "he must be incarnated in any natural being whatsoever: an ox, an oak tree, an ant, a bacterium, a virus" [32]. Thinking along this pantheistic line obliges us to see every birth as "a transmission of the divine substance, but above all as a kind of metamorphosis of the gods" [32].
See the section entitled 'Carnival of the Gods' in chapter one of Metamorphoses, pp. 30-33. And for Nietzsche's Dionysian take on this question, see section 4 of 'What I Owe to the Ancients', in Twilight of the Idols.
[f] Roland Barthes, 'The Great Family of Man', in Mythologies, selected and trans. Annette Lavers, (The Noonday Press, 1991), pp. 101-102.
[g] For those who don't know, Gaia is the primordial Greek goddess and personification of the Earth; she whom all living beings call mother. As well as Ovid's Metamorphoses, Coccia openly admits that his book has been written under the influence of the Gaia hypothesis put forward by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis [182]. It's their work which he wishes to deepen and radicalise, with sentences like this: "Being born means that we are part of this world: we formally and materially coincide with Gaia, with her body, her flesh, her life force." [37]. Obviously, as a reader of Nietzsche, I'm extremely cautious of those who deify nature or believe the earth to be a living being; see The Gay Science, III. 109.
[h] This formula can be found in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 20. Deleuze was also influenced in his thinking on this subject by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, from whom he borrowed (and adapted) the doctrine of ontological univocity.
[i] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants, (Polity Press, 2019), p. 167.
It's from sentences like this that Coccia attempts to draw what Foucault termed speaker's benefit. That is to say, sentences like this make him appear to be a bit of a rebel, or an outsider, challenging the established order, etc. Which is a bit rich, coming from a man who lectures at the École
des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), one of the most selective and prestigious educational establishments in all France.
[j] I'm referring, of course, to Deleueze's Différence et Répétition, (Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), trans. into English by Paul Patton, (Columbia University Press, 1994).
[k] Coccia is quoting from Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, tras. Henry Alden Bunker, (Norton, 1968), p. 45.
To read my notes on chapter two of Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses, click here.
To read notes on chapter three ... click here.
To read notes on chapter four ... click here.
To read notes on chapter five ... click here.
