ABSTRACT

This chapter suggest that several writers from the 19th and 20th centuries experienced slices of the protean energy of the cosmos in/through/across language, and though they did not have the term “hyperobject” to open up further exploration of it, they did have, nonetheless, the experience and image of the bell. A cell manifests a slice of protean energy; and Gaia, too, as another unit, is but a speck manifesting that turning edge of life as it burgeons forth within the vastness of the Milky Way. Indeed, “protean energy” is, to extend Jacques Derrida, “neither a word nor concept,” but a hyperobject whose “pyramidal silence” has, to echo Morton, a massive distribution across space and time. Derrida’s concept of limitrophy can help further explore, understand, and appreciate the idea that a microcosmic moment within poiesis is a slice of the hyperobject of the protean energy infusing the cosmos.