Metamorphoses. Emanuele Coccia

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, or that of the old man on the verge of death. All life, in order to develop, must pass through an irreducible multiplicity of forms, a whole population of bodies that it dons and discards with the same ease as it changes outfits from one season to the next. Every living being is legion. Each one stitches together bodies and ‘selves’ like a seamstress, like a body artist constantly modifying their appearance. Every life is an anatomical fashion show of variable duration.

      To think the relationship between this multiplicity of forms in terms of metamorphosis rather than in terms of evolution, progress, or their opposites, is not just to free oneself of all teleology. It means also, and above all, that each of these forms has the same weight, the same importance, the same value: metamorphosis is the principle of equivalence between all natures, and the process that allows this equivalence to arise. Every form, every nature, comes from the other and is equivalent to it. They all exist on the same plane. They each have a share of what the others have, but in different ways. Variation is horizontal.

      It isn’t easy to hold the gaze of this liturgy of silhouettes, none of which seems capable of both retaining and modifying the life that has been transmitted to it. In this incessant carnival of figures at once rubbing shoulders with one another contemporaneously and constituting a line of succession, forms fade into one another, pour into one another, engender one another. Each of them is a stranger that seems to come from elsewhere but who, once we become familiar with them, makes all the others seem like strangers. What we call life – whether from the point of view of the individual, the species, or the kingdoms as a whole – is nothing but a process of the domestication of successive forms. Day after day we domesticate the stranger, to the point where we lose ourselves completely in their body.

Let us call metamorphosis this twofold self-evident truth: every living thing is in itself a plurality of forms – simultaneously present and successive – but none of these forms truly exists autonomously and separately, because they are always defined in immediate continuity with an infinite number of others that come before and after. Metamorphosis is both the force that allows every living thing to be staged simultaneously and successively across several forms, and the breath of life that connects those forms with one another, allowing them to pass one into the other.