8 - bio

Summary

One of the keepers told them that there were other rooms to see [at the Sir John Soane Museum] – that there were very interesting things in the basement. They made their way down – it grew much darker and they heard a great deal of thunder – and entered a part of the house which presented itself to Laura as a series of dim, irregular vaults – passages and little narrow avenues – encumbered with strange vague things, obscured for the time but some of which had a wicked, startling look, so that she wondered how the keepers could stay there. ‘It's very fearful – it looks like a cave of idols!’ she said to her companion; and then she added – ‘Just look there – is that a person or a thing?’

What one calls life – the thing or object of biology or biography – does not stand face to face with something that would be its opposable ob-ject: death, the thanatological or thanatographical. This is the first complication.

(L'O, 17/TEO, 6)

This is the first complication. What one calls life will not be called, at least not called to come away from death, to disentangle itself from death and stand here, before us, as an object for the sciences, such as the ‘life sciences’. A life science without an object and without the eye for description: life ‘itself’, life-with-death, ‘life death’, or what I would like to call still life, endows this new science.