⇢ Lifetime #24 | A conversation with Emanuele Coccia and Clément Delépine
Emanuele Coccia is an Italian philosopher, lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
Bibliography
Coccia, Emanuele. Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image, Fordham University Press, 2016
Coccia, Emanuele. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysic of Mixture, Polity, 2018
[ FR ] Coccia, Emanuele, Métamorphoses, Rivages, 2020
[ FR ] France Culture : Emanuele Coccia, philosophe de la métamorphose
[ FR ] Le Monde : Entretien avec Emanuele Coccia
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, Ballantine Books; Reprint édition, 1986
Levi-Strauss, Claude. Race and History, Andesite Press, 2015
Transcript
Clément Delépine
While preparing this interview, I remembered a Claude Lévi-Strauss quotation which I am fond of, even if it sounds a bit like a baccalaureate topic: “The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism”; it makes me think that the dominant is above all the one who believes in his own domination. As a species, we think we are superior to other kingdoms: animal, vegetable or mineral. Despite all this power, we are paralyzed by an infinitesimal particle, by a virus, and I wonder what you think of this situation and if, in your view, it flattens the hierarchies of the living?
Emanuele Coccia
Absolutely. Among the things that struck me the most about the crisis and what we are currently experiencing, is the paradoxical situation whereby the tiniest being on Earth, the organism to which we have difficulty attributing the status of the living, which in its own body makes it difficult to recognize the boundary between a chemical life, that is to say a life of inorganic matter, and a probably biological one, that is to say organic life—because that's what a virus is—is capable of bringing civilisation to its knees.
One could even say, with the arrogance that characterises us, that it forces the most technologically developed civilisation in the history of the planet to live under house arrest for weeks and months.
In a way, this situation is liberating in spite of the horror and the number of deaths that it produces, because—I have the impression—it frees us from the illusion of an all-powerful force that has been paralysing us for some time. Even the latest debates on the Anthropocene, on the damage that our existence has done to the planet over the last few centuries, on what we are doing to all of the Earth's ecosystems, were or are sometimes paralysed by a narcissistic moment.
Essentially, we are very fond of saying, “Look how powerful we are in destruction.”
We have gone from a positive narcissism, from one who worships himself and considers Man to be at the peak of creation and looks with contempt at everything below him, to a strange form of narcissism of the one we are not, and which makes us consider ourselves to be at the peak of destruction.
We have heard several times that no other living thing is capable of destabilizing ecosystems as we have done, and obviously from a scientific, biological and even factual point of view, this discourse is nonsense, it is a discourse of a theological nature, a negative magnification of man.
It's a real challenge to our narcissism, because this virus shows us that a being that we can barely see has incomparable power and capacity for both movement and penetration. It destroys hierarchies too, because it shows us the extent to which the affirmation of an order in life also always corresponds to a part of death and the ambiguity that there is between existence and death.
From this point of view, we must not slip into this rather paranoid reading of what is happening and which attributes this pandemic solely to the errors of human management that we have made or to the ecological damage caused by our way of life—damage which is very real and must be absolutely be avoided in the future. To understand this pandemic as a simple consequence of our mistakes is once again to consider that we are really the alpha and omega of any planetary event, and it is above all to deny that others—viruses, bacteria, the elephant, the lion—have an agility, an ability to act that does not depend on us, that is autonomous, that has a capacity to kill us, to put us in danger.
Clément Delépine
Does it remain an anthropocentric perspective in your opinion?
Emanuele Coccia
Absolutely, it is a perspective that remains extremely anthropocentric and extremely paranoid as well.
Clément Delépine
Do you think that this situation we are living in is conducive to the decompartmentalisation of fields of thought and scientific disciplines, which I think you advocate in your writing?
Emanuele Coccia
It calls us, summons us, pushes us to decompartmentalise knowledge, practices and skills, but I don't think this is a situation conducive to this act of decompartmentalisation. On the contrary, it produces the opposite phenomenon: we see that everyone is trying to take the credit: there is a purely economic reading, a purely ecological reading, a purely medical or epidemiological reading, and it’s difficult to produce a discourse that doesn’t belong to a single discipline. We do not have the political culture that would allow us to make these different kinds of knowledge into something common.
Coming back to art, it’s a bit like the curator’s work in relation to the different works of art that he or she wants to show in an exhibition. It's as if the different forms of knowledge appropriate this event, caught in their egocentrism, and have given so little power to the common authority that is the curator that what results is just an exhibition that is a heterogeneous accumulation of different works and not a real exhibition.
Clément Delépine
In the conclusion of Metamorphoses you write "The future is not in the immensity of the sky, but is on the contrary microscopic, like a virus" and I was hoping you could come back a little bit on what you meant by that, and what it can mean.
Emanuele Coccia
The idea was to return to the age-old practice of looking up to the heavens to guess, understand and anticipate the future and to propose a reversal; that is to say, on the basis that there is no anthropological difference between heaven and earth since the earth is a part of heaven—we forget this, but that is what Copernicus’s discovery means. The earth is a part of the heavens, and we inhabit the heavens and not another place. We therefore should not look at the far or distant sky, but at the portion of the heavens that is close to us, the one under our feet, and so we should look at the earth, we should look down to guess the future, because the future is just down there, in the stone.
The second idea is that the future is not a distant object, that it does not exist as the past exists; the past always exists as a monument, as something that takes up space, that spreads out in space and that must, in a way, be repaired, cared for, nurtured. The future is at the same time something that exists in minimal portions of space, which cannot be cared for, which on the contrary makes us fall ill, because the future is also a disease of the present, a cancer of eternity. Basically, the future is what prevents us from remaining what we are.
And so, in a way, the most suitable metaphor for understanding what the future is—especially for the living—is a virus.
If we think about it, a virus could be described, in a departure from the strictly microbiological definition, as the mechanism that allows cells to develop and reproduce, but as if it has gained autonomy from the rest of the cell. It is the same mechanism that allows life, but detached from the rest of the body, floating freely in the air in front of us and capable of entering any other organism. It embodies the metamorphic thought that is within all life, but which has become autonomous. It therefore embodies the becoming of all life.
In the book, I end with this adage from the great American environmentalist Aldo Leopold: “live fast, die often”. Faced with the viruses of the future, the only possible strategy is precisely to speed up one's own life and let oneself die facing the future.
It sounds a little strange or odd or even cynical, but we must not forget that in our DNA there are quite large portions of viruses. What we say today is on the one hand something deadly, but on the other hand it is also an ordinary, trivial mechanism that allows all living things to change faces and experience new forms of life and existence.
To come back to the present situation, it is difficult to know what kind of world will await us when we emerge from this crisis. But what is certain is that the arrival of this pandemic has accelerated the end of a world that was already in agony and brings a future that is quite open, both frightening and full of hope, which will depend in large part on how we respond to this time of crisis.
Clément Delépine
In conclusion, I would like to come back to a few words you recently spoke or wrote in an interview given to Libération in which you said that nation-states are doing everything to fight the atmosphere—that is to say, to fight the mixing, circulation, transformation of beings—and that the new map of the world should start from the capacity of people to migrate, to free the human being from the notions of peoples and territories.
Since we were talking about living together, about multi-specific habitat, and since your books also propose to rethink the way we inhabit the world, I was wondering if you could perhaps open up some lines of thought on how to rethink the way we inhabit the world and what the alternatives could be?
Emanuele Coccia
One of the most interesting experiences of this pandemic is the impotence of the human attempt to fracture the planetary space, to set up borders. We can see to what extent life circulates, that it is defined on the basis of its capacity, its power to mix.
Even a plant, a tree which is supposed to be the most stable living thing, has to build varied instruments to throw its own offspring as far away from itself as possible. The passage between generations shakes up the geography of the planet.
The political system on which our existence has been based until today, which has given us many advantages and possibilities, is based on a rather strange form of inverse astrology.
Every time I am told that I am an Italian citizen, it is the same gesture that is made when I am told that I am a Gemini because I was born on June 6. When we determine someone from an astrological point of view, we define their identity from the position of the planets, and to determine the political identity of an individual—in the majority of cases—we do so according to their position in relation to their mother's womb. It is as if, instead of looking at the sky, we look at the earth. But this is a ridiculous point of view, because territories pre-exist inhabitants, whereas from a biological point of view, territories are the result of the life of the inhabitants. The environment never pre-exists the living being who settles there; it is the result of life and of the constant handling that each living being operates on the space that welcomes it to make its life possible.
The great challenge of the future is to design a policy that has definitively rid itself of the idea of borders. It is a false concept from any point of view—from a biological point of view, even from a geological point of view—because we always forget that continents are rafts in perpetual movement over a longer period of time. The geographical configuration of the planet changes all the time.
Life is only this capacity to draw a border and go beyond it. As soon as a living being produces a border, this border becomes a threshold, because it must be possible to go out and come back in all the time, just like light, sounds, smells, viruses, etc.