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.

 

Ghost Cats

Ghost Cat (SA/2024)

 

 

You don't need to accept everything that Dusty Rainbolt [1] tells you on the topic to believe it possible that cats possess uncanny powers and haunt the human imagination in a unique manner. 

 

But can they have a posthumous presence; that is to say, should we take the idea of ghost cats seriously? 

 

I would, as a sceptic, instinctively say no to the proposition that a dear departed feline can, as it were, still be heard purring beyond the grave and visit us in the night as a shadowy presence often coming to forewarn of danger.

 

But, having said that, stories of ghostly or demonic shape-shifting cats can be found in a vast number of cultures around the world and, like Foucault [2], I have always been fascinated by the Cheshire Cat who knows how to make himself invisible and thus become a grinning non-presence. 

 

Similarly, I have long been haunted by Dandelo, the white Angora cat who, in The Fly (1958), fails to reintegrate after being disintegrated (at a molecular level) in André Delambre's matter transporter and is lost in atomic space, from where she can still be heard meowing in a pitiful manner [3].   

Finally, there's the photo above to consider ... 

 

It's a picture I took recently of a neighbour's shorthaired ginger cat sitting in my back garden and looking a bit lonely. Apparently, he's pining for his friend who was killed by a car a few months ago and is captured here in spectral form sitting besides him.

 

What are we to make of this: is it just a trick of the light? Is there something wrong with the camera on my phone? Or is this actual photographic evidence of something spooky?

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Dusty Rainbolt, Ghost Cats: Human Encounters with Feline Spirits (The Lyons Press, 2007). 

 

[2] Foucault uses the Cheshire Cat to illustrate his model of ars erotica in which we are free to experience free-floating pleasures without holding on to an abiding essence or fixed identity (i.e., smiles without the cat).

 

[3] The suggestion is given that poor Dandelo is nowhere and everywhere and alive and dead at the same time, à la Schrödinger's famous cat in a box. 

 

   

Cocoon Above! Cocoon Below! Notes on Chapter 2 of Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia

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. 

 

To read notes on chapter four ... click here.  To read notes on chapter five ... click here.