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O n t h e q u e s t i o n o f
what it essentially is;i ts mater ia l i t ies ,
its characteristics,
considering that the attempts
t o a n s we r t h i s q u e s t i o n
by occidental sciences and philosophies
h a v e p r o v e n
unsat is factory
L IFE ITSELF
LIFE ITSELF
Koenig Books, London
O n t h e q u e s t i o n o f
what it essentially is;i ts mater ia l i t ies ,
its characteristics,
considering that the attempts
t o a n s we r t h i s q u e s t i o n
by occidental sciences and philosophies
h a v e p r o v e n
unsat is factory
L IFE ITSELF
Index
O
N
T
H
E
Q
U
E
S
T
I
O
N
… Origin
… Nourishment
… The mule’s problem
… Hot seat
… Existence
… Question
… Umwelt
… Emergence
… Selection
… Tick
… Invention
… Obstacle
… Neo-Darwinism
Harold J. Morowitz
Aristotle
Krzysztof Chodasewicz
Suely Rolnik
Antonin Artaud
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
Jakob von Uexküll
S.A. Kauffman
Thomas Nagel
Giorgio Agamben
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Gilles Deleuze
Richard Dawkins
Beginnings of Cellular Life: Metabolism Recapitulates Biogenesis, 1992
De Anima, ca. 350 BC
Evolution, Reproduction andDefinition of Life, 2014
Life is in the Hot Seat, 2002
You Have to Begin with a Will to Live, 1965
What Is Life?, 1995
A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,1934
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, 1993
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Material-ist Neo-Darwinian Conception ofNature is Almost Certainly False, 2012
The Open: Man and Animal, 2004
The Invention of Morel, 1940
Bergsonism, 1988
This Is My Vision of “Life”, 2015
22
25
26
27
28
31
32
39
40
41
44
47
48
L I F E I T S E L F
IndexIndex
T
I
A
L
L
Y
I
S
I
T
S
M
A
… The past
… In vitro
… Autopoiesis
… Linnaeus
… Living beings
… Yielding life
… Insight
… Synthesis
… Intentionality
… Target
… Stroganoff
… Matter
… Animism
Edouard Merino
Alexis Carrel
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
Carolus Linnaeus
Stéphane Leduc
Sarah Franklin
Harmony Korine
Craig Venter et. al.
Martha Nussbaum
Emily Dickinson
Alan W. Watts
Jane Bennett
Franz Kafka
Avant la neige / Je suis une Mercedes 300SL / Mario, 2006
The Permanent Life of Tissues Outside of the Organism, 1912
The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, 1987
Systema naturae, 1735
The Mechanism of Life, 1911
Stem Cells R Us: Emergent LifeForms and the Global Biological,2004
Gummo, 1997
Creation of a Bacterial Cell Cont rolled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome, 2010
Capabilities and Social Justice, 2002
Each Life Converges to some Centre, 1891
Does It Matter? Essays on Man’sRelation to Materiality, 1971
Vibrant Matter, 2010
Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor, 1915
70
71
72
73
74
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
86
O
F
W
H
A
T
I
T
E
S
S
E
N
… Organisation
… Form
… Work
… Hunger
… Anthropo -phagia
… Theory of vitalism
… In the Case of M. Valdemar
… Transparence
… Élan vital
… Structure
… Slime
… Entropy
… Nimiety
Maurice Maeterlinck
Henri Focillon
Michel Serres
Herta Müller
Suely Rolnik
Hans Driesch
Edgar Allan Poe
Barbara Duden
Henri Bergson
Antonio T. De Nicolás
Ben Woodard
Erwin Schrödinger
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
The Life of the Bee, 1901
The Life of Forms in Art, 1934
The Parasite, 1982
The Hunger Angel, 2009
Anthropophagic Subjectivity, 1998
The History and Theory of Vitalism, 1914
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, 1845
Disembodying Women: Perspectiveson Pregnancy and the Unborn, 1993
Creative Evolution, 1907
Meditations through the Rig Veda: Four-Dimensional Man, 1976
Slime Dynamics, 2012
What Is Life?, 1944
What Is Life?, 1995
49
52
53
55
56
57
60
62
63
64
66
67
69
IndexIndex
C
H
A
R
A
C
T
E
R
I
S
T
I
C
S
… Cell
… Human rights
… Alteration
… Resistance
… Artificial
… Characteristics
… Transport
… E. coli
… Rapidity
… Intensity
… Supple adaption
… Thing
… Interior
… Chance
… Sexual products
Irene A. Chen
United Nations
Sylvia Plath
Xavier Bichat
Raymond Roussel
Ernst Mayr
Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink
Thomas Nyström
Stephen Jay Gould
Rosi Braidotti
Mark A. Bedau
Steven Spielberg, MichaelGrais, Mark Victor
Barbara Creed
Jacques Monod
Sabina Spielrein
The Emergence of Cells During the Origin of Life, 2006
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 6, 1966
Face Lift, 1962
Physiological Researches on Life and Death, 1809
Locus Solus, 1914
This is Biology, 1997
A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Originsand Evolution of Life on Earth, 2015
A Bacterial Kind of Aging, 2007
The Panda’s Thumb. More Reflections in Natural History, 1980
The Posthuman, 2013
Four Puzzles about Life, 2010
Poltergeist, 1982
The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, 1993
Of Strange Objects, 1972
Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being, 1912
120
124
125
126
127
129
132
134
135
136
138
139
140
141
142
T
E
R
I
A
L
I
T
I
E
S
I
T
S
… Transgenics
… Engineering
… Reticulated tree of life
… Irreversibility
… Assemblage
… Life-liness
… Ignorance
… Transformation
… Islam
… Egg
… Sustainability
… Interdepend-ence
… Terrestrial life
… Shellfish
Luciana Parisi
Oleg Semenov, Darko Stefanovic, Milan N. Stojanovic
Stefan Helmreich
Leslie Whetstine, StephenStreat, Mike Darwin, David Crippen
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Nikolas Rose
Freeman Dyson
Julio Cortázar
The Quran
Denis Diderot
Legislative Assembly of thePlurinational State of Bolivia
Paul G. Falkowski
Bruce H. Weber
David Foster Wallace
Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire, 2004
The Effects of Multivalency andKinetics in Nanoscale Search byMolecular Spiders, 2014
Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, 2009
Pro/con Ethics Debate: Whenis Dead really Dead?, 2005
A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980
The Politics of Life Itself: Bio-medicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, 2006
Life: What a Concept!, 2007
Axolotl, 1952
Sûra 23:115, 610–622 AD
Conversation between D’Alembert and Diderot, 1782
Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, 2010
Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable, 2015
On the Emergence of Living Systems, 2009
Consider the Lobster, 2004
90
91
92
94
100
103
104
105
110
111
113
115
116
117
IndexIndex
T
H
E
A
T
T
E
M
P
T
S
T
O
… Tetris
… Human activities
… Eery
… Abject
… Tumor
… Too much life
… Egg-getters and kamikaze sperms
… Metabolic
… Prerequisite
… Tree of prelife
… Stardust
… Trees
… Others
Martin Gardner
Hannah Arendt
Eli Pariser
Julia Kristeva
Helen Oyeyemi
Jackie Stacey
A. T. Goetz, T. K. Shackelford,S. M. Platek, V. G. Starratt, W. F. McKibbin
Carl Sagan
James Stevenson, JonathanLunine, Paulette Clancy
Martin A. Nowak and Hisashi Ohtsuki
Lawrence M. Krauss
Ali Smith
Rosi Braidotti
Mathematical Games. The FantasticCombinations of John Conway’s New Solitaire Game “Life”, 1970
Vita Activa and the Human Condition, 1958
The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What WeRead and How We Think, 2011
Powers of Horror, 1982
Dornička and the St Martin’s Day Goose, 2015
Teratologies. A Cultural Study of Cancer, 1997
Sperm Competition in Humans: Impli -cations for Male Sexual Psycho logy, Phy -siology, Anatomy, and Behavior, 2007
Definitions of Life, 1970
Membrane Alternatives in Worldswithout Oxygen. Creation of anAzotosome, 2015
Prevolutionary Dynamics and the Origin of Evolution, 2008
A Universe from Nothing, 2009
Artful, 2012
The Politics of Life Itself and New Ways of Dying, 2010
168
172
174
175
176
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
C
O
N
S
I
D
E
R
I
N
G
T
H
A
T
… Co-dependence
… Orbiter
… New life
… Schrödinger’s cat
… In common
… Definitions
… Eternity
… Recipe
… Incarnation
… Numerical example
… Genetic
… Technosubject
… Homo sacer
… Agreement
… Terror
Octavia Butler
NASA
Alan Dorin
Ursula Le Guin
Carol E. Cleland
Carl Sagan
Giordano Bruno
E. Wade Davis
Nnedi Okorafor
G. J. Chaitin
Carl Sagan
Allucquére Rosanne Stone
Giorgio Agamben
Evelyn Fox Keller
Kelly Link
Bloodchild, 1984
Viking Mission to Mars, 2015
Artificial Life Art, Creativity, and Techno-hybridization, 2015
Schrödinger’s Cat, 1974
Life Without Definitions, 2012
Definitions of Life, 1970
De l’Infinito Universo e Mondi, 1584
Preparation of the Haitian Zombi Poison, 1983
Lagoon, 2014
To a Mathematical Definition of “Life”, 1970
Definitions of Life, 1970
Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures, 1991
Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998
Creating “Real Life”, 2010
The Specialist’s Hat, 1998
143
147
149
150
152
154
156
157
159
160
163
164
165
166
167
IndexIndex
T
I
O
N
B
Y
O
C
C
I
D
E
N
T
… Tarantula
… Insect
… Oblique
… Novelty
… Biochemical
… You
… Occasional cousins
… Cyborg
… Capacity
… I am the sun
… Division
… Excess
… Numbers
… Terra firma
Charlotte Taylor
Jussi Parikka
Clarice Lispector
Alfred North Whitehead
Carl Sagan
Suely Rolnik
Isaac Asimov
Donna Haraway
N. Katherine Hayles
Georges Bataille
Paul Davies
Eugene Thacker
Nils Aall Barricelli
Lynn Margulis andDorion Sagan
Spiders: Their Structure and Habits, 1860
Insect Media, 2010
The Stream of Life, 1973
Process and Reality, 1929
Definitions of Life, 1970
Despachos at the Museum:Who knows What May Happen …, 2000
Not as We Know it. The Chemistry of Life, 1981
A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century, 1991
How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 1999
Solar Anus, 1931
The Fifth Miracle. The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life, 2000
After Life, 2010
Numerical Testing of Evolution Theories, 1962
What Is Life?, 1995
217
218
219
222
223
224
225
226
228
229
233
234
235
236
A
N
S
W
E
R
T
H
I
S
Q
U
E
S
… Animal
… Nothing
… Shock waves
… Weird life
… Extradimen-sional space
… Resurrection
… Two rabbits
… Hymns
… Immortality
… Sorcery
… Qi
… Urea
… Ending
… Spock
W. J.T. Mitchell
Lawrence M. Krauss
Akiva Bar-Nun
David Toomey
Dr. Martin Concoyle and G.P. Coatmundi
The Bible
Daniel Koshland
Rig Veda
Stefano Piraino, FerdinandoBoero, Brigitte Aeschbach, Volker Schmid
Roland Littlewood and Chavannes Douyon
Zhuangzi
Jacob Berzelius and Friedrich Wöhler
Plato
Star Trek
The Rights of Things, 2003
A Universe from Nothing. Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, 2012
Shock Waves and the Origin of Life, 1977
Alien Life on Earth, 2013
The Mathematical Structure of Stable Physical Systems, 2014
Luke 24:1–12, 80–100 AD
The Seven Pillars of Life, 2002
Book I, Hymn CXIII, 1500 BC
Reversing the Life Cycle: Medusae Trans-forming into Polyps and Cell Trans -differentiation in Turritopsis nutricula
Clinical Findings in Three Cases of Zombification, 1997
Zhuangzi, 370–287 BC
Correspondence between J. Berzelius and F. Wöhler, 1828
Phaedo, 360 BC
Quote in: What They Didn’t Say: A Book of Misquotations, 2006
192
193
194
199
202
204
205
206
208
209
211
212
215
216
IndexIndex
A
L
S
C
I
E
N
C
E
S
A
N
D
… Aging
… Life’s age
… Star Wars
… Contradiction
… Impurity
… Electronic bard
… Narcotics
… Corpse
… Endocannibal-ism
… Stakes
… Alien
… Nonorganic
… Deathless
EJ Stewart, R Madden, G Paul, F Taddei
Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon
George Lucas
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Thomas Mann
Stanislaw Lem
Avital Ronell
Barbara Smuts, J. M. Coetzee,Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer,Wendy Doniger
Peggy Reeves Sanday
Cary Wolfe
Dan O’Bannon
Manuel DeLanda
Boris Groys
Aging and Death in an Organism that Reproduces by MorphologicallySymmetric Division, 2005
Life Before Earth, 2013
Quote in: The Meaning Of Life,Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We are Here, 2007
The Science of Logic, 1817
The Magic Mountain, 1924
The First Sally (A), or Trurl’s Electronic Bard, 1965
Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction,Mania, 1992
The Lives of Animals, 1999
Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, 1986
Postscript: On “the Living”, 2008
Alien, 1979
Nonorganic Life, 1991
Ilya Kabakov. The Man WhoFlew into Space from his Apartment, 2006
237
239
240
241
242
243
252
253
254
255
256
257
259
P
H
I
L
O
S
O
P
H
I
E
S
H
A
V
… Panspermia
… Handicap
… Inheritance
… Lib
… Objects
… Secret
… Occurrences
… Persistence
… Holistic
… Intelligence
… Ethics
… Symmetry
… Haitian zombi
… Another Life
… Vivisection
Svante Arrhenius
Susanne Lundin
Annie Prud’homme-Généreux
John Schad
Anne Sexton
Karen Barad
Hans Henny Jahnn
Benedict de Spinoza
Lisa Randall
Michael Pollan
Rebecca Skloot
Marcus du Sautoy
Maya Deren
Yuval Noah Harari
H. G. Wells
Worlds in the Making, 1908
Creating Identity with Biotech-nology: The Xenotransplanted Body as the Norm, 2002
What is Life? An Activity toConvey the Complexities of This Simple Question, 2013
Epilogue: Coming Back to Life, 2003
The Room of My Life, 1960
Living in a Posthumanist Material World – Lessons fromSchrödinger’s Cat, 2008
The Ship, 1936
The Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata), Part Three, 1677
Knocking On Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate Our Universe, 2012
The Intelligent Plant, 2013
Henrietta’s Dance, 2000
Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey through Symmetry, 2008
Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 1953
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2011
The Island of Doctor Moreau, 1896
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
272
274
276
277
278
IndexIndex
F
A
C
T
O
R
Y
… Frankenstein
… Artificial intelligence
… Checklist
… Terran life
… Order
… Reassembly
… Yearning
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Christopher G. Langton
Evan Thompson
National Research Council
Ilya Prigogine, IsabelleStengers, Alvin Toffler
Lygia Fagundes Telles
Simone de Beauvoir
Frankenstein; or, The ModernPrometheus, 1818
Artificial Life, 1989
Mind in Life. Biology,Phenomen ology, and the Science of Mind, 2007
“Front Matter." The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, 2007
Order Out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue With Nature,1984
The Ants, 1978
The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1948
299
301
302
304
307
308
309
E
P
R
O
V
E
N
U
N
S
A
T
I
S
… Excuse
… Physiological
… Reproduction
… Organic soup
… Virus
… Everything
… Non-linearity
… Undead
… Need of others
… Semiotics
… Agency
… Thermo-dynamic
… Intercourse
… Sex
René Descartes
Carl Sagan
Judith Roof
William Martin, John Baross,Deborah Kelley, Michael J. Russell
Ulrich Kuhnt
Fiston Mwanza Mujila
Sanford Kwinter
Rabindranath Tagore
Zygmunt Bauman
Marcello Barbieri
Karen Barad
Carl Sagan
Anais Nin
Hilda Hilst
Animals are Machines, 1637
Definitions of Life, 1970
The Poetics of DNA, 2007
Hydrothermal Vents and the Origin of Life, 2008
Are Viruses Living Things?, 2008
Poemes et Revasseries, 2008
Architectures of Time. Towards aTheory of the Event in ModernistCulture, 2002
The Living and the Dead, 1916
Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, 1992
Biosemiotics: A New Understanding of Life, 2010
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entangle-ments of Matter and Meaning, 2007
Definitions of Life, 1970
Delta of Venus, 1939–1944
The Obscene Madame D, 1981
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283
285
287
288
289
291
292
294
295
297
298
This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition
Life Itself – On the question of what it essentially is; its materialities, its characteristics, considering that the attempts to answer this question by occidental sciences and philosophies have proven unsatisfactory
Organised and produced by Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Moderna Museet, Stockholm20 February–8 May 2016
ExhibitionCurators: Daniel Birnbaum, Carsten Höller, Jo WidoffExhibition assistant: Olle ErikssonCurator, learning: Ulf ErikssonConservation: Thérèse LilliegrenHead of technicians: Mats Roswall
CatalogueEditors: Daniel Birnbaum, Stefanie Hessler, Carsten Höller, Jo WidoffTranslations: Hans Berggren: Rolnik, p. 27; Allyn Hardwick: Merino, p. 70, Mujila, p. 287; Gerrit Jackson: Berzelius/Wöhler, pp. 212–214: Kuhnt, pp. 285–286Production coordinator: Teresa HahrGraphic design: Christoph Steinegger/InterkoolFront- and endpaper illustrations: Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur(Art Forms in Nature), 1904Paper: SP Mine Paper 168gPrinting: Göteborgstryckeriet, Göteborg 2016
© 2016 Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Koenig Books, London, the authors, the translators
“Axolotl,” copyright © 1967 by Random House LLC; from End of the game and other stories by Julio Cortazar. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random HouseLLC. All rights reserved.
Moderna Museet exhibition catalogue no. 390
ISBN 978-91-86243-74-6(Moderna Museet)
ISBN 978-3-86335-889-1(Koenig Books)
www.modernamuseet.se
Published by Moderna Museet and Koenig Books
Printed in Sweden
Koenig Books LtdAt the Serpentine Gallery
Kensington GardensLondon W2 3XA
www.koenigbooks.co.uk
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