Jean-Marc Drouin - A Philosophy of the Insect

A PHILOSOPHY OF THE INSECT

A PHILOSOPHY OF THE INSECT

JEAN-MARC DROUIN

TRANSLATED BY

ANNE TRAGER

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

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Translation copyright 2019 Columbia University Press

Philosophie de linsecte by Jean-Marc Drouin copyright 2014 Editions du Seuil

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54072-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Drouin, Jean-Marc, author.

Title: A philosophy of the insect / Jean-Marc Drouin.

Other titles: Philosophie de linsecte. English

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2019] | Philosophie de linsecte by Jean-Marc Drouin, 2014 Editions du Seuil. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019006036 | ISBN 9780231175784 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231175791 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231540728 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: InsectsPhilosophy.

Classification: LCC QL463 .D7513 2019 | DDC 595.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006036

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Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

Columbia University Press gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Florence Gould Foundation Endowment Fund for French Translation.

CONTENTS

I especially thank Anne-Marie Drouin-Hans, for suggesting the title, but especially for having accompanied me throughout the writing of this essay. For their careful reading of the entire manuscript, I also thank Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Colette Bitsch, Frank Egerton, Jean-Jacques Levive, Luc Passera, Annie Petit, and Christine Rollard. Laure Desutter-Grandcolas commented on a communication that prefigured certain aspects of the book. Romain Julliard enlightened me about entomology as a participatory science. Pascal Tassy checked , and Patrick Blandin clarified my information on the hermit beetle case. This book also echoes a suggestion made by Jack Guichard about the royal metaphor in bees.

F oraging bees have an uncertain future. Ravenous grasshoppers cause devastation. Butterfly wings shimmer. Mosquitoes vector disease. Industrious ants thrive. Enemy wasps attack picnics. Round ladybugs are childlike. Larvae swarm in a half-eaten piece of fruit. Coupling dragonflies form a heart. Praying mantises play out tragic love.

Our representations of insects are many, as are the reactions of fascination or repulsion that they arouse. Scholarly curiosity and the resulting construction of entomological knowledge, far from reducing this multiplicity, reveal its full extent.

The world of insects is marked by twofold alterity. Strange compared to our world, we break theirs into multiple forms. In 1709 the French author Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle describes insects as animals so different from all others, and so different among themselves, that they allow us to understand the limitless diversity of models nature may have used to make animals for an infinity of other habitats. The sentence is taken from a funeral eulogy written for the physician Franois Poupart, author of a History of the Formica Leo published in the Mmoires de lAcadmie (Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences) in 1704, and who, according to Fontenelle, had the patience to observe insects and the art of discovering their hidden life.

The temptation to use superlatives when speaking about insects is great. This can be witnessed in the way Charles Darwin describes bees that manufacture honeycombs and ants with their slave-making instincts, considered as the most wonderful of all known instincts.

Not everyone has shared in this attention given to insects. In 1753 the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon proclaims in his Discours sur la nature des animaux (Discourse on the nature of animals) that a fly must not hold in the head of a naturalist more room than it holds in nature. He demonstrates that the scientific scope of a study is not measured by the size of its objects but by the relevance of its methods and the pertinence of its questions.

In the following century, Pierre-Andr Latreille describes a very large number of insect species and attempts to classify them employing the method of natural families botanists had begun to use. At the same time, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck defines invertebrates, distinguishing insects and arachnids, based on their anatomy and physiology.

In everyday language, people commonly use the term insect in a broad sense to cover everything from spiders to scorpions. This use of the word insect is not only incorrect in terms of vocabulary but is a true misclassification, an error based on lack of knowledge of the biology of these animals. Indeed, paleontology and comparative anatomy confirm that the distinction between insects and arachnids, far from being arbitrary, is justified by their evolutionary history.

Arachnids, however, have a long history of being found alongside insects in books, exhibitions, and articles about these tiny creatures that haunt our homes and our environment. This is far from new. In the 1879 Souvenirs entomologiques (Book of insects) by the French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre, spiders and scorpions occupy a place of honor. Fabre, like Raumur before him, is more interested in observing behavior than in the labor of classification, although he has perfectly integrated the distinctions Latreille and Lamarck have made. As made explicit in the French title, his memories are deliberately entomological and not just about insects.

The relationship contemporary Western culture has to insects cannot be reduced to one of fascination and repulsion. At the most insignificant level, insects provide a wealth of familiar expressions and metaphors, including being as busy as a bee or as crazy as a bedbug, to have butterflies in your stomach or ants in your pants, to be a fly on the wall or even a social gadflysomeone who is both irritating and stimulating at the same time, a description used by Socrates to describe his method. The most famous rock band of the 1960 bears a namethe Beatlesone letter off from a group of insects that form the order Coleoptera. Some nursery rhymes and songs mention insects, among which The Ant by French resistance member Robert Desnos comes to mind.

Literature and cinema tend to stage insects as a threat. Ants, in particular, claim celebrity status.

In addition to novels and fictional films in which insects spark anxiety, some photographers and movie producers use close-up images of insects to astonish as much as to instruct, to fascinate more than to worry by showing a microcosmos and the faces of insects. The same inspiration can be found in museum projects, such as the Montreal Insectarium.

In general, insects occupy different places in different cultures. Andr Siganoss book Les Mythologies de linsecte (Insect mythologies) analyzes the roles insects occupy in the structures of the collective imagination.

One might be tempted to believe that the ultimate phobia would take the form of humanity fighting off insect invasions of the countryside and cities, but worse has been imagined: a breach of the self. When the hero of Kafkas Metamorphosis is transformed into an insect, he loses possession of himself. In Woman of the Dunes , a Japanese novel published in 1962 and brought to the screen in 1964, the readers anxiety stems not from size or invasion but from the hero being trapped like an insect.