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10-« Quelque chose qui flotte, qui bouge… qui grouille… ». Some Flows of the Formless in Late Anthropocene Fiction

This essay addresses a diffuse category of matter figuring with increasing urgency in our imaginaries of the sea, its subsurfaces, and landfalls: mobile, shapeless biological and geophysical phenomena that are among the most devastating and unsettling evidence of our ongoing planetary ecological crisis. Drawing on an image of a massive jellyfish bloom in Jean-Marc Ligny’s 2012 post-Anthropocene novel Exodes, I briefly explore the relevance of the subjective experience of abjection to the churning, boundary-crossing structure of the image, before turning to George Bataille’s related concept of the formless (l’informe) and its leveling of anthropomorphism as a defining structure of human and non-human experience. I argue that Ligny’s vision of a clotted, pinkish soup churning at the ocean’s surface signals the tasks of the formless in imagery of the Anthropocene’s decline: the unsparing foreclosure of a naïve anthropomorphism and the basis of a utopian post-anthropology.

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