After Eden

It was about nine years ago that I first saw a praying mantis. It lay dead on the ground. Its body was cut clean in half and two or three long strings were writhing from its torso, like little black snakes trying to wrestle free from an outgrown skin. A child of perhaps five years pointed at the spectacle, trying to attract his mother’s attention to it. Do not touch it, she said, and pulled her son away with the instinctual recognition that some things are best left to themselves.

What was it that struggled to escape the corpse? The question stayed with me for a long time. The worms were either parasites or scavengers. Their bodies seemed too alien to be parts of the mantis’s remains, so they must have arrived from outside in one way or another.

Only recently did I discover that the worms were horsehair worms, likely mature representatives of Chordodes japonensis or Chordodes formosanus. The horsehair worm begins its life in a pond or deep puddle, where it hatches from an egg. With some luck it happens upon the larva of an aquatic fly or mosquito to which it attaches itself and forms a small cyst. The miniscule worm remains with its intermediate host as the latter matures without causing any harm worthy of note. If the host is eaten by a praying mantis, the juvenile worm breaks out of its cyst and comes to live freely in the body of its definitive host which for all intents and purposes has signed a warrant for its own death. The worm grows inside the unsuspecting mantis for some time.

As the worm reaches maturity, it excretes an enzyme into the host’s brain that manipulates the mantis to be attracted to the sort of horizontally polarized light that is characteristic of deep water.^[1] At first, the mantis behaves erratically, perhaps in response to a weak but increasingly potent suggestion. The end result is certain and deadly. The mantis dives into a pond or stream and drowns. The inner worm, which may have grown to a length of fifty centimeters, breaks free and can search for a mate to restart the cycle.

The Praying Mantis Reappraised (From Male Fucking Machines to the Mantid Mirror)

Parasites that influence their hosts’ behavior are very common in nature, so why was I so disturbed by theworms? I decide to reappraise the praying mantis itself. A mainstay of discourse on mantises throughout the twentieth-century has been anthropomorphism. It is not unsurprising that the insect would evoke curiousness since the praying mantis appears so humanlike with its triangular face, large eyes, and raptorial forelimbs. In the West, it used to be a pious figure and a geographer, an Edenic character who would point the way to lost travelers and children. Encountering a mantis was a good omen.

It was a good omen until it was not. With time, the peaceful representation gave way to an image of feminine monstrosity, doubtlessly encouraged by Jean-Henri Fabre’s early-twentieth-century studies which were presented to the public in a manner flirting with poetry:

[T]he Mantis lives exclusively upon living prey. It is the tiger of the peaceful insect peoples; the ogre in ambush which demands a tribute of living flesh. If it only had sufficient strength its blood-thirsty appetites, and its horrible perfection of concealment would make it the terror of the countryside. The Prègo-Diéu would become a Satanic vampire.^[2]

Few episodes are more important in the gradual concatenation of mantises and violence than the surrealists’ obsession with the sexual cannibalism that females of certain species sometimes engage in. Both Breton and Éluard kept mantises in their home, and they would invite their friends to observe how the female mantises ate the heads and thoraces of their mates, sometimes even in the middle of copulation.^[3] For some time, it was even thought that removing the brain from the male served a disinhibitory purpose and might increase fertilization rates. Mantis motifs began appearing in paintings and poems (by Dalí, Ernst, Masson, Luca, Labisse …) embodying archetypes of the femme fatale and castrating woman. In hindsight, this line of interpretation was the result of a fundamental misunderstanding. Eating a partner’s head during intercourse achieves the exact opposite of castration: a reduction of man to “fucking machine”,^[4] as Elizabeth Grosz put it. The male is turned into pure, unadulterated manhood, a reservoir of nutrients and sperm.

The surrealists’ misguided anxiety nevertheless testifies to the supreme power of the praying mantis to force the soul into involuntary movements. It reveals our psychic weakness to the human image. Even before the anonymity of the internet enabled an unprecedented rise of self-posited subject positions via alt accounts, the world was not devoid of images that could shape our understanding of the human soul. Nature contains many forms that allow human beings to change their relationship to themselves in determinate ways. Some may even transform how we understand our capacity to shape ourselves.

Roger Caillois recognized the mantis’s “objective capacity to act directly on the emotions”[5] as a kind of symbolic overdetermination, a case of morphological parallelism that is capable of evoking all kinds of lyrical and conceptual bridges and passages to other domains of the natural world. The mantis invites anthropomorphism because the structural convergence of its visage with ours utilizes a vulnerability of the human mind. It is not the mantis’ fault, but neither is it ours. There are real patterns in nature that make thought think this way or that. Mantid anthropomorphism results from the combination of a genuine resemblance and our irresistible tendency toward apophenia that forces the human mind to see itself reflected in the mantid mirror. It is what might be called a relationship of paramorphism, a term borrowed from geology where it is used to describe mineral transformations that involve a change to crystal structure that leaves the chemical composition unchanged. It is by abducting this kind of transformational process and reapplying it to the realm of conceptual relationships between forms that the validity of the mantid mirror can be allowed to pass into view. In this sense, a paramorphism is the conceptual partnership between two forms that resemble one another. The objective strength of the paramorphic partnership depends on the tension between the partners: too little resemblance and the connections will be far-fetched; too much will make it be mundane.

What has become known as anthropomorphism is rooted in real resemblances and convergent solutions to biological problems. Anthropomorphism goes far beyond projection of human attributes onto nature. The relationship between the human and its insect double is a two-way exchange that covers a range of secret conceptual and behavioral transductions that have poetic, hence objective, validity. In paramorphic partnerships like the one between human and mantis, it is clear that what happens to one also happens to the other such that stories, myths and behaviors can be the objects of intelligible transpositions. For this reason, the praying mantis is a model species for anthropological and biological speculations that pay no heed to phylogenetic kinship. The mantis is a vehicle of self-discovery that can be turned into a target for deliberate remaking of the self. Resemblance is real and really goes both ways, fortuitously linking the parties together in a manner that cannot be undone. It even seems that human appearance is shifting closer to the appearance of certain mantis species in a way that empowers the paramorphic relationship, with cultural ideals of female beauty acting as an attractor for stereotypically mantis-like traits such as a thin waist, large eyes, and a petite face.

Her partial resemblance with just enough otherness allows the mantis to pry open fatal vulnerabilities in our conception of who we are. She is nature’s own attempt at a philosophy of the human being. More than uncanny, the praying mantis reveals our deepest insecurities by transgressing our entrenched ideas about a natural order: Most mantises are plant-like ambushers. They sit on small branches and leaves, waiting for suitable prey to come within striking range. For the most part they make themselves invisible, indistinct from their immediate surroundings. The conclusion that mantid mimicry also creates a second paramorphic partnership between insect and vegetation is ready to hand, and by way of a mantid hinge, a chain of resemblance that runs between mammal and plant is drawn into view. I am opened onto the vegetal world, ridiculed and contorted. Arcimboldo’s portraits of men and women as vegetal assemblages were already anticipated and mediated by the praying mantis on the birthday of the first human child. The insect occupies the halfway point between a portrait and a still life; between the “I” and the apple. She sits right at the border between animate and inanimate, mimicking the latter in order to sustain her animation. Her plant-like demeanor leaves even wary victims at risk of drawing too close. I look at her and see someone like myself. I have “[t]he mental life of a fruit”. My meditations, too, belong to a “vegetal history of thought”.^[6]

Aristotle taught that the human soul consists of three distinctive capacities: the rational soul that is the property of human beings alone, the perceptive soul that we shared with animals, and the nutritive soul that is possessed by animals and plants. The capacities are ordered hierarchically in the sense that each is less widely distributed than the other: The rational capacity is more restricted than the perceptive capacity which is more restricted than the nutritive capacity. Because the capacities of the soul are ultimately what keeps life living, it is only natural that the form of life itself is associated with the most widely distributed capacity of the soul. The higher faculties are in service of it and modify the conditions under which life is lived. The soul, of course, is not a substance but an explanatory crutch to understand the form and behavior of animals.

The nutritive capacity is the most basic in that it is universally distributed between complex living beings, and is therefore intimately and directly connected to what it means to be alive. In effect, the nutritive soul is the faculty of generation and regeneration of organisms and it includes such functions as nourishment, growth, and reproduction that are shared by all living beings. Of these functions, Aristotle maintains that reproduction is the “most natural”^[7] and fundamental act. He argues that reproduction is the means by which an organism can participate in eternal life. Since nothing earthly is truly eternal, life opts for the second best, which for plants and animals alike is the generation of offspring in the parents’ image. This way, living beings can reach out for eternity by continuing “its existence in something like itself”.^[8] Reproduction is the most basic function of the soul because it takes a limited participation in divinity for its immediate end. Nourishment, or nutrimentation, though stemming from the same source as reproduction in the nutritive soul, is ultimately subservient to the function that allows life to recreate itself beyond the expiration date of individual organisms. In any other case, life would have been a very short story.

Even if the post-Darwinian denaturation of the species concept did not destroy the Aristotelian argument that life reproduces itself in order to participate in divinity in principle, it created a challenge in practice. Examinations of natural history have shown that sexual reproduction is a relatively late artifact of evolution (though obviously monumental). Although sex is near-ubiquitous in the eukaryotic life that Aristotle is interested in, sexual reproduction does have an origin—overtaking other modes of reproduction that did not require engaging a conspecific partner. The same cannot be said of nourishment. Life’s connection to appetitive acts runs to its very beginning. All reproduction may be a means to perpetuate metabolism, but without an appetite for food, there would be no metabolic process to perpetuate in the first place and life would have been an even shorter story.

When I observe a mantis eating her mate, I am taken on a journey into the deepest reaches of the human soul. Irrespective of what lies beneath, her reduction of my spirit to its barest minimum increasingly seems like a naturalistic echo of the methodological skepticism deployed by Descartes in his own series of meditations. The insect performs a new excavation of the hierarchy of the capacities of the soul; subtly but deeply. The mantid mirror quickly shaves off all facets of life that do not belong to the nutritive soul as legitimate candidates for being the fundamental faculty of life. However, it is not clear that her image leads to the same bottom as the philosophers reached; the same foundations in the pit of the soul…

Hunger First

A principal inspiration for Freud’s account of the death instinct, Sabina Spielrein’s seminal essay on the self-destructive implications of procreation remains one of the most significant attempts to interpret the intimate connection between reproduction and death, placing the “destructive drive” alongside and in inseparable connection with the “drive for coming into being”.^[9]

Following production of a new generation, many lower creatures, e.g., the May fly, forfeit their lives, dying off. Creation for this organism is undertaken for survival [of the species] and is simultaneously destructive for the adult… In more highly organized multicellular organisms, the whole individual will obviously not be destroyed during the sexual act. However, the fewer number of germ cells comprising the reproductive unit are not merely indifferent elements of the organism… They contain, in concentrated form, the generative power by which they have continually influenced the organism’s and their own development. Fertilization destroys these important substances.^[10]

Destruction is an essential, almost logical component of regeneration, and regeneration is the goal that guides the development of the organism. The assumption that sexuality is the primary, basest function survives from Aristotle to Freud. As Grosz puts it, “Freud’s works can be understood as a generalization of and abstraction from the model of male orgasm to the fundamental principle of life itself”.^[11] I return to the surrealist’s anxiety about the sexual cannibalism of the female mantis. Their specific brand of unease was built on the same assumption that reproduction is the primary function. The result has been a complete inability to appreciate the cannibalistic act on its own terms, making room for an interpretation that was not only manifestly opposed to the factual basis (castration as opposed to death) but, even more gravely, could not interrogate the nature of the connection between the acts of eating and having sex.

It is true that female mantises sometimes engage in cannibalism during and after sex, but the significance of the double-act has been sensationalized. Explanations for sexual cannibalism eventually moved into a so-called female-choice paradigm, where resource-starved females were understood to supplement diminishing resources by consuming their male partners. But even this explanation assumes that sexual cannibalism is a mystery to be resolved.

“Sexual” cannibalism is not the only instance of conspecific predation among mantises. Mantis nymphs often prey on their siblings and cousins at different instar stages in order to gain competitive advantages by speeding their own growth over their rivals. A classical account of such early cannibalism was offered by Rösel (recounted by Prete and Wolfe),^[12] who, when he

placed several in a glass jar for observation […] found that both young and oldspecimens battled viciously with each other, the victor alwaysdevouring the vanquished. Rösel likened these ferocious battles tothose of vicious hussars, fighting to the death with razor-sharpsabers. However, more important than the fact that his youngmantids devoured one another was Rösel’s claim that they did notcease to attack, kill, and eat each other even when their hungerhad been satisfied by an abundant supply of other, nourishingfood!^[13]

The important takeaway from Rösel’s observations is not that mantises are particularly vicious kinslayers but rather subjects of indiscriminate hunger. Praying mantises are suitable prey for praying mantises, and they simply have no reason to decline an opportunity to engorge on one another. Naturalists biased by human morality have gone to extreme lengths in order to avoid normalizing that arthropods hunt vertebrates and conspecifics as a matter of course. Their denial is understandable since the philosophical stakes of the mantis diet are higher than that of any other arthropod due to the insect’s affinity with the human image.

There are now many observed cases of mantids preying on small birds and rodents. There is even a single recorded instance of a Hierodula tenuidentate male hunting fish in an Indian garden over the course of several nights. The group of researchers that observed the mantis described its habit in typical deadpan fashion as follows:

During the five days, the mantid was observed capturing and devouring a total of nine guppy fish. In seven cases, the mantid started eating from the tail […] On a single occasion, he started from the head and on another, from the top side. On the first four of the five days, the mantid was observed to hunt and devour two fish. The second fish was hunted within 10–30 mins of consuming the first one. After the fifth day, the mantid disappeared and was not observed again at the pond.^[14]

The account contains elements of a mystery horror novel, made all the weirder because of questions that receive no answers. Where had the mantid learned to fish with its raptorial limbs? The fact itself implies an advanced ability to learn that goes beyond basic strategies of aversion or avoidance of toxic or otherwise dangerous prey.

A moralist’s last effort: Insects should not eat living vertebrates. It is wrong. It is immoral. It is monstrously transgressive. Nature falls from its hinges. It is inhuman. Have you ever seen a mantis eat a fly? It is inhuman. They eat without paying any heed to what it is they eat, slowly nibbling eyes and heads of insects, birds, and fish—anything they can bring within their reach. Faced with the inescapable force of evidence, it has become impossible to deny that mantises are generalist predators that diverge from their supposedly usual diet of insects as a matter of course. And if mantises eat everything, their sexual cannibalism is best understood as another permutation of the normal state of affairs. Mantises are voracious generalists that routinely turn on their smaller conspecifics like they would on any other prey. Hunger is their primary instinct. Nutrimentation is their primary function.

In response, the human image falls toward its deepest firmaments. The voracity displayed by the mantis recreates the need to differentiate between hunger and sexuality, the interests that correspond to the basic functions of nutritive soul. Is the one drawn from the other? How are the functions of the nutritive soul individuated? In at least some cases the two functions impinge on one another. As Spielrein put it in her essay on the destructiveness of procreation:

There are concrete practical experiences that, through, sexual impulses, can often substitute the process of eating for coitus. Two factors are effective: 1) past pleasures associated with eating; and 2) frequently increased appetite resulting from habitual impulse. The opposite also is observed. Although the need for nurturance cannot be entirely replaced by coitus, we often see overwhelming sexual desire in undernourished individuals.^[15]

Sex increases hunger and hunger increases the potency of the sexual drives. Spielrein’s point appears to support the orthodox belief that reproduction and nutrition are fungible functions that occasionally become confused. The nature of the confusion of the functions is, however, less clear, precisely because the relationship of the respective desires in their fully individuated state is poorly understood. Are the nutritive functions (nutrimentation and reproduction) really fungible in the sense that one can take the place of another?

Aristotle’s search for the “most natural” function already suggested that there is an order of priority between the different functions, whereas mantis cannibalism simply inverted his preferred order. Cases where several nutritive interests coincide on a single object are exceptionally interesting with respect to examining the relationship between the functions of the nutritive soul. If reproduction were primary to nutrition as it is assumed in what passes from Aristotle to Freud, the expectation would be that we, every so often, would fall back to eating our intended sexual partners. In a world where reproduction is the primary striving, a confusion of interests could only mean that objects of sexual interest would sometimes be consumed, which is precisely how sexual cannibalism in mantises has been interpreted. However, if the opposite is true and reproduction is derivative of nutrition, female mantises are simply having sex with their food whenever dinner seems sufficiently virile. On the latter account, there is no confusion between fungible functions but a coincidence of two distinctive interests on the same object. “Sexual” cannibalism is no longer a puzzle to be resolved. It is simply an instance of the same cannibalism that is observed among mantises in general.

It is impossible to maintain that the femme fatale is the appropriate image unless the term is taken in the most literate sense. The praying mantis is a girl in full possession of herself. Dalí would freak out—she’s not even after his testicles, only taking his sperm as an afterthought. A mantis that enjoys her partner for dinner fails to withhold her hunger from her mate. If reproduction is an afterthought (as it now seems), it might be equally justified to say that the mantis is the most virginal figure there is. She is a model for a Stoic potential in life, an exemplar of self-affirmation because she refuses to sacrifice a prey object to her reproductive drive. (The upshot is that tempering the destructive component of reproduction by binding sex to nutrition allows sexuality to prosper freely. Sex is no longer dangerous.)

One thing is true for all life: without nutrition it grinds to a halt. The interlocking circuit of constraints that constitutes an organism requires some source of nutrition to remain alive. Desire begins with food and is normally rerouted, overtaken, even stolen for the interest of reproduction. The mantis alongside other invertebrates certainly does eat her sexual partners, but according to the hypothesis of opportunistic predation, it is more appropriate to say that she represents a point at which the individuation of sexuality and associated withdrawal of hunger from the sexual object is incomplete whenever she copulates with some of her food.

Not only does the “sexual” cannibalism of the female mantis pacify historical anxieties about castration (though not without replacing them with a motivated fear of death) but it ruthlessly seizes on the Philosopher’s mischaracterization of the nutritive soul in a way that is fully, hopelessly, reflective of my own being. The unsubordinated hunger of the mantis is her most potent paramorphic trait, working subtly but deeply on the human soul. The mantid mirror reflects an absolute, insatiate, and unfettered appetite.

Generations of the Transcendental Interests of the Soul

The question remains as to how the reproductive function and sexual desire are related to nutrimentation and hunger. One answer of the results of the preceding meditation is that secondary functions and their associated desires are siphoned off from their primary counterparts.

Such an answer requires an ontogenetic account of how new functions, like (sexual) reproduction, are derived from hunger; moreover, it requires a novel cartography of the soul. Do newly engendered faculties create functions within extant parts of soul or do they create new parts of soul? The question belies a distinction between the interests of the nutritive soul and that which serves its interests. Interests are nutritive and new interests seem like they would reside in the nutritive soul, even though Aristotle says that “appetite will be found in all three parts”.^[16] It is hard to see that perceptive and rational souls would have appetitive interests in the same way as the regions of nutritive soul; instead, they might equally well be seen to have teleological structures that serve the interests of the nutritive soul. Each part of soul can be endowed with new additional functions (e.g. smell and other detection of chemical elements are introduced at a certain point in life history). If appetite, writ large, belongs to the nutritive capacity, each additional part of the soul corresponds to a type of activity that serves the functions of the nutritive capacity which maintains life.

What was at stake when the praying mantis ate her partner—the virgin sage enjoying her mate—was the order of the functions of my nutritive soul. In the end, her meal reveals an embryonic cartography of the faculties. The results of my meditations have been clear enough: nutrimentation is the fundamental interest of life. Nothing is deeper than predation. Puberty must be a drug that creates transcendental change in those who undergo it. Sexuality as such is perhaps siphoned off from hunger and turned into an autonomous force against the interests of the individual for the benefit of the next generation.

As for the other capacities of the soul, its powers for sensation and reason, they appear tethered to the nutritive soul in two ways. First, they are tools that support the organism’s acquisition of nutrients. Eyes are organs for remote fondles and objective cognition is in the service of dinner. Second, they appear to be concrete simulations of concrete nutritive acts like eating and copulating. Although thought has been seen as kind of “a permanent orgasm”,^[17] the primacy of hunger suggests that thinking may first of all be a simulation of eating. If the higher faculties are bound to the nutritive functions of nutrimentation and reproduction, perception and reason lack true autonomy.

I think back to the horsehair worms slithering out of the corpse. I understand their significance better than I did before. They were transcendental drugs: a fundamentally different interest inhabiting the subject with direct implications for how the world was seen (a matter that is completely irreducible to languages of sexual preference as the mantis does not recognize the prosthesis as an organon of sexuality at all). The worm is a new spirit in the automaton, a foreign force that molds the higher faculties of the host to suit its reproductiveinterests. It is a third function of the nutritive soul. The philosophical implications are extreme only because they reveal how thoroughly unremarkable the worms’ transformation of the mantid psyche is.

What is the difference, from the perspective of my own sustenance, whether the drives that control my perception belong to another’s reproductive interests or my own? In each case, my nutritive need is captured by regeneration as such. The very existence of sexuality, as a mode of reproductive interest, changes the transcendental constitution of the organism that suffers it. From the advent of sexual reproduction, life has been about navigating the disparate interests of the nutritive soul. Like Eve ate her fruit to discover a new world beyond the Edenic life she knew, ingesting certain foods changes the transcendental makeup of the predator. Eve’s experience generalizes across species. The worm’s efficacy is a repetition of puberty, a recapitulation of the departure from Paradise.

Beside hunger, every function is artificial. Among the higher faculties, it is reason alone that can invent new functions for the nutritive soul, posit new tasks for itself to perform; new subject positions for the human to live. Reason is like a transcendental worm poisoning the soul, which is to say a parasite controlling life for its own ends. Correlatively, the origin of sexuality as such could only have been a spontaneous act of reason, an apple growing from the seed of an unknown encounter between two ancient cells, perhaps one of the first: an acephalic thought of nature that bent the nutritive soul to serve the interests of a new generation rather than the self. Today we continue where nature left off.

Some time after my last meditation, I find myself in a painting by Félix Labisse. It is the one with the mantis woman. I look at my lover. There is a desiccated citrus on my desk next to a strand of her hair. The dry rind is still attached to a branch. I have not eaten for days and her next meal is in view. We sit on the couch. My head is resting on the desk, connected to a spinal column. I look at my lover. She will finish her dinner and then turn her appetite elsewhere. Perhaps it will be toward me. She is hungry, and I can offer her the nourishment she needs. I look at my lover. A thousand little sorrows are recorded in the fabric of her face. Her lips move in and out of a hesitant smile, and in a matter of seconds now, the enormous eyes will close in to drink my thoracic sap. I undress and let her kiss my open neck. The branch snapsbut my head only bleeds a little on her hair.