Abstract
Life is metamorphosis. This has been observed many times. The german biologist and poet Goethe was one of the most influential proponents of such an approach. This is not just a nice attitude and a hollow phrase. The idea of transformation holds a comprehensive ontology of the living. Goethe tried to demonstrate the reverberations of this idea at his time with his mostly artistic means. Today we can corroborate the general notion of metamorphosis by a very specific picture of the living, of life-as-transformative relationships, and of a world gaining depth through the experiences of individuals. Individuals who are perceiving can be imagined as the whole being able to perceive itself. But to do that, the whole needs to be split up and contradict itself. In this view contradiction is the necessary and sufficient prerequisite for caressing.
“So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this non-word — between the lines — takes the bait, something has been written.”
Clarice Lispector (2014)
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Weber, A. (2016). Words. In: Biopoetics. Biosemiotics, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0832-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0832-4_7
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