Lovebug
Daisy Lafarge
16 €
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Coup de coeur
(Essays), by Ella
| Lovebug is a beautifully strange book about love and contagion. It is a lesson in learning to live with what fears us most and rethinking the proximity between human life, disease and virus. Using microbiology and psychoanalysis to explore both what makes us vulnerable and ties us together, Lafarge encourages us to welcome uninvited guests and forge non-phobic relationships, perhaps both with 'parasites' and the wider world. Stepping outside of conventional forms of essay and fiction, this is an exploration of abjection, in which we can seek new ways of living and loving by embracing the radical vulnerability of human life. |
When was love first described as a sickness? When did the body in love begin to be likened to one battling an infection? In this meditative and inventive essay, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand our intimacy with microbial life. Even in an age of fermented food and flourishing microbiomes, when it comes to thinking about infection, our imaginations remain dominated by an old script of good versus evil: the pure self threatened by pathogenic others. But as Lafarge points out, microbial cells in our bodies equal or even outnumber those that are 'human', while ancient viruses are inscribed in our DNA. So-called human life simply would not exist if the world were divided into binaries of self and other, good and bad, sickness and health. Lovebug is an essay about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. Turning to microbiology, literature, mysticism, and psychoanalysis, Lafarge explores the un
Publisher: Peninsula Press Ltd
Binding: Paperback
Publication date: 05 Oct 2023
Dimensions: 197 x 128 x 12 mm
ISBN: 9781913512378
