Come back Giorgio, all is forgiven

In working on this D&D essay (I know, I know), I've been looking at Heidegger, marvelous, and now it's Agamben's turn. All right, all right, I think I was a little harsh on him recently. He has his good points. One of which is a lucid and succinct account of Uexküll. Of course, the real winner here is Uexküll himself, whose work just is, to coin a rhyme, cool.

As Levi posted quite a while back, Uexküll gives you a vivid (who cares if somewhat distorted and fanciful) picture of what it's like to be on the inside of an object: what it's like, in other words, to be any object whatsoever. To be an object is to inhabit a world that is hermetically sealed from other worlds. Evidence of other worlds, and other entities, shows up in distortions of the world in question, such as the vibrating web of a spider.

Although the spider and the fly may not directly know one another, the spider's web is attuned to the fly. Remember, beauty is death...it's the same for the tick. When she eats her fill, she lays her eggs and dies. She tunes to her world through butyric acid.

Interpreting Ueküll's insight, Agamben writes:

There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exists a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which Little Red Riding Hood loses her way.


OOO adds: yes, but let's not forget the forest-for-the-spider, the forest-for-the-spider-web, the forest-for-the-tree, and last but not least, the forest-for-the-forest.