Relations of the Third Kind

This chapter is concerned with writing, or language more generally, and the insectile, the extent to which writing establishes a scene of fascination linked to insects, as a process (including that of speech and of reading) that bears the traces of an entomological fascination and which, as a result, has the potential to generate an insectile subjectile. The chapter is, in a first instance, indexed to Maurice Blanchot’s work on fascination and the movement of writing in The Space of Literature (1955) while further turning to consider The Infinite Conversation (1969), in which Blanchot speaks of writing as a ‘relation of the third kind’. In the texts considered here, writing functions as space of fascination pushing into relations of the third kind: the chapter begins with Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor (1969) and proceeds through several other encounters with insects—A.S. Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’ (1992), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (2000)—before arriving at Clarice Lispector’s 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H. In each of these texts, the enigma of fascination implicates the subject in the insectile, and the scene of writing taking place constitutes itself as a scene of intimacy—or extimacy, using Lacan’s term—with the insect other that fundamentally disrupts the being of the subject.