Métamorphose
In Emanuele Coccia’s work, metamorphosis isn’t a rare event reserved for a few insects but the ordinary condition of the living. A single, selfsame life passes from form to form, body to body, species to species: the caterpillar and the butterfly, the child and their parents, the living and the Earth all share one life that never ceases to change its garments. This material continuity makes every being an assemblage of heterogeneous histories—*“every living thing is a chimera.”* The difference of forms does not break the unity of life; it is its mode of existence.
Tous les vivants sont, d'une certaine manière, un même corps, une même vie et un même moi qui continue à passer de forme en forme, de sujet en sujet, d'existence en existence.
The word carries a strong thesis: there are not, on the one hand, fixed species and, on the other, a few spectacular exceptions where one form transforms into another. Metamorphosis is everywhere—it is “the most elementary metabolism of all living things.” To be born, to eat, to die are already metamorphoses: each time, a life leaves one form to take on another. The caterpillar that becomes a butterfly is only the most visible case of a general law—“a single and same life is shared by two bodies” that have nothing in common, neither anatomy, nor world, nor way of living.
From this comes the formula that structures the book: every living thing is a chimera. Coccia grounds this in the biology of symbiosis—the eukaryotic cell born from the fusion of very distant lineages—to conclude that “every species is, in its deepest nature, a chimera.” Each body assembles evolutionary histories that do not resemble one another; each life is the relay of other lives that preceded it and which it extends. Continuity, then, is not the identity of a substance that would persist beneath changes, but the fact that the same life circulates between incompatible forms.
This material continuity sharply distinguishes Coccia from two neighboring concepts. Taoist wuhua also conceives of the ceaseless transformation of beings, but against the backdrop of an impersonal Tao where no “self” persists; for Coccia, it is “one and the same self” that passes from form to form, a subjectivity that migrates. Reincarnation, by contrast, transports an already constituted subject—a soul—through successive bodies that remain external to it. Metamorphosis ≠ the subjectless cosmic ground of wuhua; it ≠ the passage of an intact traveler from one body to another, since it is matter itself—and not a separate soul—that is transmitted and reconfigured.