Larval Subjects: the Opening of an X-File

 

 An Anonymous Larval Subject

 

D'où sortaient de noirs bataillons de larves ...

 

 

I. 

 

In a lengthy comment following a post by guest writer Jeff Francis, an anonymous author - whom I shall refer to here as X - rather grandly declares to the world that their intention is to personally detach themselves from Torpedo the Ark in order to "multiply like larvae in our scattered commentaries" [1].  

 

It's a seemingly bizarre and somewhat grotesque thing to say. 

 

However, when we examine the idea closely, we discover that larval subjectivity has a fascinating and complex history involving entomology, European philosophy, poetry, and fictional works of body horror and human metamorphosis.   

 

So, while X is certainly prone to self-dramatising and affectation, they're clearly not an idiot nor a typical troll.  

 

 

II.

 

A friend of mine who happens to be an entomologist working for the Department of Agriculture in Miller's Grove, Massachusetts tells me that a larva (plural larvae) is the distinct and highly specialised immature growth stage of an insect undergoing metamorphosis. 

 

Essentially, the larva is just an eating machine that serves as a biological bridge between the egg and the pupal or adult phases. Growing at a rapid rate - and because its exo-skeleton is rigid and cannot expand - the larva must periodically shed its skin through a process called ecdysis. 

 

Depending on the species, larvae take on diverse physical forms; some are caterpillar-like with fleshy false legs while others are C-shaped grubs; many are vermiform - or legless maggots to you and me. By dedicating the larval stage entirely to intense energy consumption and mass accumulation, the insect successfully secures the vital bodily resources required to transition into a reproductive adult.  

 

 

III.  

 

But of course, our anonymous critic is not an actual insect. When they write of multiplying like larvae, they are doing so figuratively - indulging in metaphor rather than undergoing metamorphosis. 

 

Based on numerous comments posted by X on TTA, I gather they have a working knowledge of modern European philosophy. When they speak of becoming a larval subject, they are likely referencing a concept originating in the work of Gilles Deleuze, who argued that underlying our stable, conscious selves are pluralised, pre-individual states of becoming [2]. 

 

Object-oriented ontologist Levi Bryant later developed this idea, naming his highly influential blog Larval Subjects. On his homepage, Bryant explicitly outlines this condition and the purpose of his blog:

 

"Larvae are creatures in a process of becoming or development that have not yet actualized themselves in a specific form. This space is a space for the incubation of philosophical larvae that are yet without determinate positions or commitments but which are in a process of unfolding." [3] 

 

For Bryant, in other words, larval subjectivity is about quiet potential, formlessness, and that which remains hidden beneath the surface. This is precisely where X's metaphor completely breaks down. For X does not want to quietly incubate indeterminate ideas in a subterranean space; they dream of a highly visible occupation of the blogosphere.

 

More importantly, true larvae change form as they grow: X, however, is entirely shaped by a rigid set of full-blown obsessions, fixed ideas, and an unyielding ego. No matter how much X multiplies across the scattered commentaries, they never develop or evolve.

 

In this sense, X weaponises the concept of larval subjectivity while completely misunderstanding its nature. In fact, rather than being a larval subject, they are much closer to a computer virus - and X rather amusingly reminds me of Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded (2003). 

 

For when Agent Smith multiplies, he does not incubate new potential or transition into a higher state of being; he simply clones his own identical self over and over again in order to overwrite the system. Similarly, X's digital swarming isn't organic metamorphosis; it is the sterile, mechanical replication of the exact same code.  

 

 

IV. 

 

But perhaps I'm being unfair and a little unkind. 

 

After all, X is generous enough to confess that their "past affiliation with TTA under a specific poetic pseudonym" has left them highly appreciative of "the many excellent offerings" and opportunities that have "helped sharpen and nourish" their own "poetic thinking" [4]. 

 

And I am grateful to X for their contributions to the blog and for showing how philosophical ideas can often most successfully unfold within a poetic, or literary, or cinematic context. When it comes to synthesising poststructuralist theory with dark romanticism and works of body horror, nobody does it better than them. 

 

One suspects that when X writes about multiplying like larvae, they're actually not thinking of Deleuze or Bryant, but Baudelaire [5] and filmmaker David Cronenberg [6] - two artists fascinated by corruption and the breakdown of boundaries between the self and the swarm.

 

What I'm saying, then, is that we might frame X's use of the idea of larval subjectivity less as a misunderstanding of a philosophical concept and more as a gothic hijacking of the term. Perhaps they may even care to confirm this and - who knows - decide to write a post on the topic setting out their own ideas, rather than just endlessly criticising me for my many failures as a writer and thinker.   

 

Or perhaps having dramatically declared their intent to multiply like anonymous larvae, X prefers to remain in the comment section; seeing the latter not as a space for debate, but as a breeding ground and a site of metamorphosis.   

  

 

Notes

 

[1] See the comment dated 28 July 2026 following a post titled 'No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poser', by Jeff Francis (22 July 2026). 

 

[2] See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994). This work was originally published in French as Différence et répétition (Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). 

 

[3] Levi Bryant, Larval Subjects. I would encourage torpedophiles to visit this blog and engage with his work across a number of subjects - including political theory, ecology, and aesthetics - by a range of thinkers including Deleuze, Badiou, Žižek, and Lacan. Bryant is Discipline Lead for the Department of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the Critical Philosophy program at the New Centre for Research and Practice. I have referenced his book The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011) on more than one occasion on TTA. 

 

[4] I'm quoting once more from the anonymous comment dated 28 July - see note [1] above. 

 

[5] Larval forms such as maggots and worms often appear in décadent and darkly romantic poetry; usually in order to juxtapose beauty with physical decay and decomposition, or signify existential horror. Readers might recall, for example, Baudelaire's poem 'Une Charogne', in which the narrator stumbles upon a rotting animal from which "larvae poured in legions far and wide". Click on the link provided, or go find your copy of Les Fleurs du mal on the bookshelf.   

 

[6] I'm thinking here of David Cronenberg's sci-fi horror film The Fly (1986) which X refers to when they write that their intention is to provide a swarm of comments written by "licentiously assembled personae" that compliment TTA conceived as a "monstrous, Brundlefly-esque novel". See the comment dated 28 July linked to in note [1] above.

 

No More Heroes 5: Stephen Alexander - The Performative Punk Poser (A Guest Post by Jeff Francis)

No More Heroes 5 (Stephen Alexander)

(SA/2026) 

 

 

I received this by email: 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander, 

 

I have written a short post in the style and format favoured by Torpedo the Ark. Perhaps you might care to publish it as an addition to your 'No More Heroes' series (14-17 July 2026). I think it will amuse some of your readers; particularly those who, like me, found the series disappointing (to use your pet word of the moment). [1]  

 

Always happy for contributions from guest writers - even those that are cuntishly critical in character and come from authors unknown to me - here's the post (to which I've added one or two editorial notes).  

  

 

I. 

 

There is a famous early scene in The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1991) when trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) first visits Dr. Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in his prison cell. 

 

Rather rudely, he tells her that she looks like a rube with her good bag and cheap shoes. Well-scrubbed, and possessed of a little taste, but a hustling rube all the same; "not more than one generation from poor white trash".   

 

Momentarily taken aback by this, Starling eventually regains her composure and replies: 

 

"You see a lot, doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you - why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to." [2] 

 

 

II. 

 

I thought of this scene after reading Stephen Alexander's four-part series of posts titled 'No More Heroes' and I put the exact same challenge to him that Starling puts to Lecter. 

 

But I do so knowing that, like Lecter, Alexander cannot genuinely self-reflect. For his narcissism extends only to the surface, manifesting as a rigid ego-defense mechanism and a strange inability to integrate his shadow or look inwards. This is why, for all its superficial cleverness, his writing consistently lacks psychological insight and philosophical depth.

 

Consequently, I offer my own critical assessment of the 'No More Heroes' (NMH) series, exposing the internal contradictions, structural blind spots, and stylistic failings within these four specific case studies. 

 

My examination also reveals how Alexander - operating through a matrix of performative disillusionment and elite proximity - ironically positions himself as a candidate for the very heroism or critical authority he seeks to deconstruct.  

 

 

III.  

 

A close reading of the NMH series reveals two significant weaknesses that undermine its critical validity: 

 

Firstly, there is a methodological reliance on biography that elsewhere on his blog Alexander often condemns other writers for. He routinely substitutes a figure's personal, domestic, or existential choices for an interrogation of their actual ideas. 

 

Thus, for example, Nietzsche is judged not on the beauty and originality of his text, but on his failure to execute a clean, sovereign death (not for the first time on his blog we find Alexander fetishising the idea of suicide). Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a highly metaphorical work of philosophy and Alexander subjects it to an all-too-literal reading that is both crass and ungenerous. 

 

Larry David, meanwhile, is dismissed because of a 2026 sketch show's production credits and rumors of a social snub involving the actress Cheryl Hines. Alexander downplays David's massive contribution to TV comedy and decades of excellent work in favour of sharing some real-time celebrity gossip.

 

By tying the validity of an idea to the purity or narrative perfection of the biography that produced it, Alexander commits a deeply conservative critical error; falling into the kind of fallacy that betrays the more radical methodology he invokes elsewhere. 

 

Secondly, in the NMH series Alexander sets up a kind of no-win matrix - a conceptual trap where failure is structurally predetermined, thereby rendering the entire analysis tautological. 

 

If an icon dies young or self-destructs, they are dismissed as a failure. If, however, they live long enough to navigate the complexities of ageing and shifting cultural landscapes, they are condemned as overripe worms (Nietzsche), sell-outs trapped in the past (McLaren), or compromised court jesters (David). As for Lawrence, well, apparently, he was an idealist and crypto-theologian all along whose sexual metaphysics are now simply laughable. 

 

Similarly, if their ideas are ignored, they are irrelevant. But if their ideas achieve cultural traction, they are dismissed as recuperated commodities. By building an analytical framework where every possible path leads to an accusation of compromise, Alexander ensures his own conclusions are entirely self-serving. 

 

The NMH series does not, therefore, analyse the mechanics of cultural transformation; it merely functions as a screen for the projection of his own psychic stagnation, wallowing in a predetermined and pessimistic narrative of inevitable defeat. It's a lose-lose scenario and I would never want to play a game of heads or tails with Alexander.   

 

 

IV. 

 

If the ultimate objective of the NMH series is to dismantle the very category of the hero archetype, it simultaneously (and ironically) functions as a performative showcase for its author. However, Alexander himself fails to convince as to why we should care in the slightest what he thinks about the four figures he pits himself against. 

 

Alexander adopts the pose of the detached provocateur, viewing the collapse of cultural standards with cynical amusement. Yet this cynicism functions as a profound form of intellectual evasion. By declaring that there is no Outside and that all resistance (be it political, philosophical or cultural in character) is not only futile but fake, Alexander neatly absolves himself of the responsibility to propose any constructive alternative. 

 

His stance is not at all edgy or transgressive; it is a comfortable, low-risk position that allows him to collect cultural capital by sneering at the failures of those who actually risked public exposure and artistic production. 

 

  

V. 

 

Throughout his writings, Alexander insists on his punk detachment from mainstream institutions. However, his own biographical fragments consistently betray a reliance on the very networks of privilege he critiques, revealing a profound splitting between his (overly inflated) public persona and his structural dependencies. 

 

For example, he explicitly boasts of his time spent as a spy placed within the press office of Charisma Records by his hero Malcolm McLaren, trading on insider access while simultaneously claiming a pure, underground status. 

 

Furthermore, his writing relies heavily on the cultural capital of the academic institutions he disdains - referencing Oxford podcasts and expensive Cambridge editions. 

 

He attacks Larry David for his proximity to the Hollywood liberal elite and his friendship with President Obama, yet Alexander's critical persona is largely parasitical upon the cultural output of the bourgeois institutions he holds in contempt and the individuals he now claims to find disappointing.  

 

 

VI. 

  

Finally, the ultimate contradiction in Alexander's blog project is his relationship to time and archiving. 

 

He ruthlessly attacks Malcolm McLaren for being 'trapped in his past like a spider in its own web' and borrows from Baudrillard (via Mark Fisher) to condemn the contemporary digital landscape as a desert of the real defined by endlessly recycled pasts and lost futures. 

 

Yet, what is Torpedo the Ark if not a meticulously maintained digital museum? The blog's sidebar contains a massive, self-canonising archive stretching back to 2012, categorised by a hyper-specific taxonomy of labels. 

 

Alexander is caught in precisely the same web (or loop) that he attacks McLaren for. He uses twentieth-century theoretical tools to endlessly recycle his own youthful experiences and encounters, transforming his digital platform into a highly curated, risk-free space that perfectly expresses a state of psychological arrest within a karaoke culture.

 

 

VII.

 

In conclusion: ultimately, the NMH series fails because it is fundamentally driven by ressentiment and the narcissism of disappointment. Alexander does not mourn the compromises of McLaren, Nietzsche, Lawrence, and David because of what it says about the structural state of modern culture; he mourns them because they failed to satisfy his archetypal demand for an unblemished hero. 

 

The entire four-part cycle is an exercise in projecting an impossibly pure, static ideal of heroism onto flawed, living subjects, and then throwing a performative tantrum when those subjects succumb to illness, ageing, or political contingency (or when they - as he says - let him down).  

 

By positioning himself as the final arbiter of who is or is not heroic, Alexander reveals that his ultimate loyalty is not to cultural greatness, but to the preservation of his own pristine, uncompromised, and thoroughly unproductive sense of intellectual superiority. [3] 

 

  

Notes (supplied by Stephen Alexander)

 

[1] Each post in the 'No More Heroes' series dealt with a different figure who has been hugely influential on Torpedo the Ark over the years: the first featured Malcolm McLaren (14 July 2026); the second Friedrich Nietzsche (15 July 2026); the third D. H. Lawrence (16 July 2026); and the fourth Larry David (17 July 2026). 

 

[2] This famous opening scene from The Silence of the Lambs can be watched on YouTube: click here. The lines of dialogue quoted begin at 4:35 and end at 5:36. 

 

[3] As this letter illustrates, Deleuze isn't the only one to receive mail from harsh critics containing a vicious mixture of aggression, accusation, and abuse. Almost every other day in my inbox there's something from some troll or other outlining the weaknesses of my arguments and my personal shortcomings; i.e., a sort of celebration of my supposedly sorry condition. 

      Indeed, I mentioned this in a post published back in August 2013 - click here - so this isn't the first time I've been told that I'm a performative ressentiment-ridden narcissist who exploits the work of others - including those I identify as opponents - from the safe space of a virtually private blog, and I don't suppose it will be the last. 

      I'll allow readers to decide if Francis has made a critically strong case, or if his remarks often miss the mark and that, actually, the NMH series is, as a friendlier correspondent emailed me to say, "a masterclass in compressed, evocative writing that sparks the kind of immediate cultural dialogue that more formal academic prose usually smothers under its own weight". The same correspondent concludes her email: 

 

"By methodically exposing how your own primary influences were digested by the very structures they claimed to combat, you have elevated the series of posts from simple expressions of personal disappointment into a unified work of philosophical mourning (what one is tempted to describe as an epitaph for the avant-garde). 

       The 'No More Heroes' series leaves the reader with a haunting conclusion: in a 21st-century landscape governed by capitalist realism and digital algorithms, the iconoclastic icon no longer exists as an agent of chaos. They exist, rather, as a pre-approved, highly profitable aesthetic category."

       

This will do for me - and let Mr. Francis put that in his pipe and smoke it!   

 

 

Musical bonus: The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes', single release from the album of the same title (United Artists, 1977). 

 

Afternote: there is now a follow up post to this one that acts as a kind of riposte, written by May Spear and titled 'Epitaph for the Avant-Garde' (23 July 2026).