We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They dont share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life.

Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet the Earth that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body.

By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccias brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris.

Acknowledgements


Introduction

The Continuity of Life

The Forms Within Us


1. Births

Every Self is a Forgetting

One and the Same Life

Birth and Nature

Cosmic Twins

Giving Birth, or the Migration of Life

Carnival of the Gods

The Speech of the Earth

Metamorphosis as Destiny

Mirror of the World


2. Cocoons

Transformations

Insects

Every Living Being is a Chimera

A Postnatal Egg

Rejuvenations

A New Idea of Technics

The Metamorphosis of Plants

The Cocoon of the World


3. Reincarnations

Eating and Metamorphosis

Being Eaten

Reincarnation and the Transmigration of the Self

Genetics and Reincarnation

The Shadow of the Species


4. Migrations

Planetary Migration

Vehicle Theory

The Great Ark

Everybody in the House

The Domestic Life of Non-Humans

Invasions


5. Associations

The Multispecies City

Interspecies Architecture

Our Mind is Always in the Bodies of Other Species

The End of Wilderness

Contemporary Nature


Conclusion


Bibliography