Abstract

Theorists such as Jussi Parikka, Jakob von Uexküll, Eugene Thacker, Sadie Plant, and others have utilized the figure of the insect as a particularly salient way of reading the materialization of information. Certain affinities of insect anatomy and behavior with technology aesthetically collude with technologies of communication. But is such use of the insect figure merely metaphorical, or does it drag with it other aspects of the insect body and its bearing on the physicality of information? In either case, the notion of the insect body proves an interesting point for recognizing a tension between communication and language in contemporary posthuman discourse. As Lacanian psychoanalysis is invested in this difference, and in unfolding the post-, in-, or non-human human the human, a guiding question issued to Lacan in the name of the insect body could be: Did he have a vested interest in the non-discursive or “primordial” materiality of the world other than as an instructive disruption of language? In other words, does materiality have a role in his theories other than that of the speaking of/as the symptom, thereby cutting through, but ultimately mutating, communication?