ABSTRACT
This chapter initiates the book’s focus on form. It engages with the fantasy of the insect body arising in relation to the work of Ernst Jünger, who, more so than Kafka, charts the Verwandlung at stake here. The argument is intent not on observing alienation, then, as in Kafka’s novella, but on witnessing the assemblage of a subject fortified, armoured, assuming an ideal-I as coleoptera. There is a fascist politics at work in this imagination, discussed in Jünger’s work, putting forward a Typus of ‘man.’ Typus arises out of entomological practice and refers to systems of classification; it is paragon and fantasy of form. The chapter further places Jünger in relation to Madeleine Dewald and Oliver Lammert’s rhizomatic 2002 documentary film Vom Hirschkäfer zum Hakenkreuz, gathering an associative chain between stag beetle [Hirschkäfer] and swastika [Hakenkreuz]. Across these texts, the insect is produced as fascinating and fetish object, vehicle of fascist desire, articulating the exoskeleton of an aspired subjective form.
