Rethinking Life by Silvia Benso;

Author:Silvia Benso;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Between Crystals and Smoke

The being of life is irreducible to substantial presence because life is a process that is always on the verge between crystals and smoke. It is the precipitate of a negotiation between a deterministic order and a stochastic disorder; it is an uninterrupted creation that emerges as “the compromise of a liquid vortex, between the redundancy of the crystal and the complexity of smoke.”3 To be a living being does not mean to be in a specific state. Rather, it involves an incessant dynamic of disorganization and reorganization in which lumps of matter and energy seem to rebel against a natural necessity—as if they were escaping from the need of their own dissolution—that nevertheless constitutes them by transforming disorder into organization and noise into information. Life-being (essere-vita)—the being of life, being life, being alive—means being steeped in some sort of struggle of nature against itself, as if life were some kind of an aporia of nature; as if life were the event that leads nature to the extreme limit at which nature discloses some form of unnaturalness or, at least, of resistance against its reduction to a physicalist concept.

This is what emerges from Xavier Bichat’s Recherches physiologique sur la vie et la mort. In this work, the major French physiologist of the Revolutionary period proposes what is considered to be one of the most powerful definitions of life in the course of Western thinking. Bichat writes that “life consists in the sum of the functions, by which death is resisted.”4 As evident, we are not confronted here with a definition that tells us what life is. On the contrary, we are told what life is not, that with respect to which life presents itself as an opposition. If there is something that is, something that has the characters of substance and presence, in Bichat’s definition, that is, death or, as it were, materiality as dead matter. Death is what is presented as the normal condition of being, as the standard condition in relation to which life represents a form of resistance, an oppositional action.

Bichat does not tell us, then, what life is. He does not indicate any substance that may be identified with life. Yet he says a lot about the way of being of that which lives. He says that the living being is the labor of a process that is inevitably destined to end. Life is, for Bichat, resistance and struggle to persist in the condition of never being a still substance. In this tension to persevere, which has nothing to do with the will because it does not imply a “beyond” life itself, one realizes that precisely this movement is, simultaneously and in the same respect, that which both makes beings alive and leads them to death.5 Death is never given according to the logic of certainty, though. The molecules of life are in fact subject to a randomness that is never entirely controllable or governable—unless, that is, they give up their being alive

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