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Insect affects: the big and small of the entomological imagination in childhood
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 14:50 authored by Loo, S, Sellbach, UDrawing on a scene in J.M.G. Le Clézio's novel Terra Amata, which tells the story of the instincts of a small boy, the minute sensoria of some bugs and a cosmic catastrophe, this essay demonstrates the ambivalence around insects in animal studies, their contingent location in psychoanalysis and the conundrums they place in ethical philosophy. By reading Le Clézio's tale through Uexküll, Freud, Dodds and Stengers we argue for more nuanced, imbricated and critical connections between ethology, psychoanalysis and ethics. These connections become imperatives in the face of the current environmental crisis, where we urgently need to attend to co-affecting relations that are too distant or proximate, tiny or vast to register as familiar sentient states or ethical feelings. In the process we demonstrate the performative dimensions of what we call the entomological imagination – present in the strange proximity of child and bugs, the powerful unthinking god, the indifference of the insects to human commands, and the infinitesimal catastrophe in Le Clézio's story – that facilitates an epistemic fluidity required for a contemporary understanding of ecologies.
History
Publication title
AngelakiVolume
20Pagination
79-88ISSN
0969-725XDepartment/School
School of Architecture and DesignPublisher
Routledge Taylor & Francis LtdPlace of publication
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, England, Oxfordshire, Ox14 4RnRights statement
Copyright 2015 Taylor & FrancisRepository Status
- Restricted