The images of the parasite and of the infective agent therefore take the place of the traditional metaphors of ferocity. In other words the struggle concerns not so much wolves and lions […] but rather flees, cockroaches, leeches, and bacteria. While the enemy as ferum (wild beast) must be captured or killed, the enemy as a parasite or infective agent requires instead a methodical, aseptic and cold disinfection.
Simona Forti, The Biopolitics of Souls, 2006 # 32
Who is afraid of flees and bacteria
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- More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think ‘transversaly’. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mut …
What if everything is entangled
This text resonates even more so after the Corona crisis: not because epidemics can happen and cause damage, but because the logic of pandemic measurement and surveillance resonates with an everyday regime in which bodies are continuously monitored and quantified. Watches measure sleep, heart rate and oxygen; scales measure weight, fat, muscle, water. The body becomes a territory of numbers — permanently measurable, legible and open to intervention. The fleas, cockroaches, leeches and bacteria of the passage have not disappeared; they have, in a sense, turned into numbers on a scale.
Meike Gleim, 2026of our Imagination
