Life and death of a beheaded cockroach

 The organ’s life beyond the organism’s death

 

When thinking about life (organic life, the heaving and teeming life which is the object of biology) a myriad of different concepts starts to flood our mind, coagulating together in an often eerily unclear understanding - to name a few: organism, survival, reproduction, evolution, adaptation, development, death. In much the same way, as many images appear before our eyes: an individual cell, birds building a nest, an ant queen laying her eggs, the extinction of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals, a flower attracting its pollinator with its colours, a sprouting seed, fish and octopuses feasting on a whale carcass on the sea bottom. But let’s try to bring some order into this chaos of images and concepts, and picture a living being - something that lives, a model of ‘life’ itself, or rather, the unfolding of life itself within a life span. It is a truism to say that, until its death, a living being is, in fact, alive, and that to be alive means to live - to quote, ‘Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben’^[1].

Picture a cockroach. It is an insect, belonging to the order of the Blattodea - therefore, an animal. Animals are far from being the most obvious representatives of the living world. Animals make up only 0.47% of the total biomass, where plants make up a staggering 82.4%.^[2] At the same time, animals count 7.7 million species^[3], while there might be a trillion species of microbes on planet Earth (if they can be divided in species at all).^[4] Any criterion to find a form of life which best expresses the functioning of life itself is arbitrary, but there are a few reasons why animals are, despite their cosmic insignificance, a good choice.

Firstly, we humans are animals - and surely, a roach is phylogenetically distant enough for us to observe it with a certain detachment, but at the same time we can empathise with its frantic running here and there (it is a kind of empathy which immediately elicits an uncanny form of self-alienation: the cold feeling of finding yourself to be less than human, while at the same, the warmth of reconnection with our primordial living essence). Animals live a life ours is a form of - and if animal life is indeed life, then it will still manifest all the essential characters of life, in a way that we can interrogate more easily. Interrogating trees, algae, or worse, viruses, might be too much of an alien experience. Imagine trying to trace the boundaries of the living to answer the question ‘who lives?’, when something like interspecies grafting is possible^[5] - there is a reason why Hegel considered plants as a diffused and branching individuality, with no central subject or individual - something which is still not a proper life, vita, but only a vitality.^[6]

Secondly, animals seem to retain clearer boundaries and individuality^[7], which helps us picturing one living being, and therefore discriminating between ‘what is alive within its life and what is not’. By this obscure phrasing, I intend to present the idea that within an organism’s life, its organs are ‘alive’. For example, my eyes are alive, as long as they are attached to my body and minimally functioning (for example, I might lose sight due to an injury, but if I heal, my eyes are still part of my living body - if they start to rot, perhaps they’re hardly part of my body anyway, even if they are still physically attached to it). My eyes are ‘alive’ only in a derivative sense, as they engender one mode or function of the organic life I am living (for example, sight and everything that is connected to it, such as circulation, movement and so on). That is why my eyes are my eyes (a fact that Heidegger saw very clearly in his 1929-30 lectures^[8]), while they are barely still ‘eyes’ once I am dead. In much the same way, while the beehive (the whole wax structure) is surely an expression of the bees’ life, it is not alive in itself, nor can it be considered as an organ of the bees.^[9] The same principle holds for all life forms - leaves are alive for its plant, and so is a cellular membrane for its cell.

Animals still give us a clearer image of their boundaries, of what is part of their living body and what it is not - what is part of their life and what is not. Of course, once we look into the details, such borders leak, lines get blurred, and we have to start wondering whether the microbes in our gut are still separated living beings we made an evolutionary alliance with, or actually - somehow - our organs - or perhaps both. But before such wondering happens, we retain a sense of the individual who lives.

Life, infact, is something that is lived, and a living being lives its life. This way of speaking of life sounds almost biographical, and it is probably the reason why biology has its name: βίος is vita quam vivimus, life understood as an effect (for example, I can dedicate my life to philosophy or politics, while my cat dedicates his life to eating, sleeping and occasionally playing) - while ζωή is vita qua vivimus, life understood as a cause (for example, an oak, a dolphin or a cell of E. coli live because they have a development, a metabolic relationship with their environment and so on).  Somehow the two concepts got conflated, and biology understood proper life as producing something akin to a biography: a living being is conceived, it grows, reproduces and dies.^[10]

A biography starts with birth, but most importantly, it ends with death. And yet, death is not the end. I present two examples of conceiving ways for the organism’s functions to continue being actual after its death. Take the reproduction of insects such as ants or bees. The queen will mate with its harem of males once, storing the sperm in her abdomen, to be used in the later years, while the males will just die off, after having fulfilled their roles. During the colony’s lifetime, is that sperm an organ of the queen, or is it still functionally something ‘belonging’ to the dead males? The whole adaptive character of males consists exactly in this mode of reproduction - not only mating and dying off, but producing a kind of sperm which is able to be stored by the queen (on her part, the queen has to be able to store it). The ‘storability’ itself of such sperm is part of what allows the queen to keep the colony alive for years, so that we could say that the adaptive function of the males lives beyond their death. Another case is, in a sense, any hereditary adaptation. Think of all the behaviours birds enact to protect the survival of their eggs and chicks. As adaptations - traits which ‘guarantee’ survival and reproduction -, are such behaviours, as traits, belonging to the parents or to the offspring? It is adaptive for the offspring to have such parents, so that they can grow up and eventually reproduce. Since such behaviours are also traits of the parents themselves, we can say that their adaptive value does not reside in the mere survival and reproduction of the parents, but also and perhaps mostly in the survival and reproduction of the offspring. Adaptation has an inherent transgenerational character - so that, even after the parents’ death, if the offspring is fit enough to survive and reproduce, their fitness is not just inherited from its parents - it engenders its parents’ organic life itself. Every generation lives through the next one - or rather, organs and their functions survive the death of the individual, almost as organs without bodies, or with an evolving multiplicity of bodies. (By extension, going back to the first living being and the first undistinguished and unarticulated function, we could find a full coincidence between the organism and the organ. In this sense, the organism as a whole is an organ whose only function is merely, and quite formally, living.)

Even such conceptual stretches still fit within the common sense view of individual life - after all, we say things like ‘the heritage of our ancestors lives on through us’, which might be interpreted quite literally, and Richard Dawkins went so far as to call genes ‘immortal coils’.^[11] It is easy to see immortality when we see purpose, adaptation, strategies for ‘going beyond’ and defeat mortality. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche lets life itself reveal its essence: ‘And this secret life itself spoke to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself’^[12]. This interpretation fundamentally coincides with that of evolutionary biology. As evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously stated, ‘Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution’^[13], which means that nothing biological makes sense - that is, is biological and essentially living - outside of the process of self-overcoming of life, the eternally losing battle of evolution and adaptation against death, from which all species and life forms come from. Life is life only within this battle, an aspiration to immortality through reproduction and diversification. Without death there would be little or no evolution at all, and it would not even be possible to distinguish an organism from a mineral.

However, I want to present a case which goes beyond this grandiose view of life - the case of dying life, a life that dies with no possibility of fighting back and overcoming itself - that of a walking, living dead. Such a case might have ethical implications, if applied to human cases, but we will not delve into it (and in all honesty, we should always ask ourselves if we really can or should draw ethical implications at all). For now, again, picture a cockroach - and chop its head off.

Waiting for death

 

Without its head, a cockroach can ‘live’ for weeks.^[14] It ‘lives’, in a way a human head or a human body do not really ‘live’ for some seconds after decapitation. The structural integrity of the human body is radically compromised, as its life support system almost immediately shuts down: blood loss and loss of blood pressure hamper the transport of oxygen and nutrients to the tissues, breathing stops, and all the organs which are controlled by the brain stop working. The anatomy of the cockroach, however, allows for a very different kind of situation. The low pressure of the cockroach’s circulatory system prevents any uncontrolled bleeding, often to the point that its neck will just seal off by clotting; the body keeps breathing through the spiracles present on each body segment; being cold-blooded, it can keep on functioning for weeks without eating; finally, thanks to the agglomerations of ganglia found in each segment of their body, they are still able to perform basic nervous functions, standing, moving and reacting to touch. The head, on its part, deteriorates far more quickly, as the brain needs inputs from the body to function normally, but it still weaves its antennas for hours after decapitation.

What is the state of such a cockroach? Even speaking of a cockroach seems problematic - suddenly, the body and the head are two different things, with different fates. However, the status of the two parts seems different. On its part, the head retains minimal cognitive functions ‘until it runs out of steam’^[15], but it can barely sustain itself, as it cannot perform any metabolic function. The body, on the contrary, breathes. Breathing is a basic function of an organism’s metabolism - it ‘provide[s] oxygen to the cells at a rate adequate to satisfy their metabolic needs’^[16], and the body keeps ‘living’ off the nutritional resources from its last meal. In other words, it basically ‘dies’ of starvation, as any animal unable to catch prey.

Now, suppose cockroaches have a subjectivity, or a (not very rich) kind of conscience. For Hegel, animals are the first form of subjectivity proper - das selbstische Sonne, a poetic way of showing the difference between plants and animals: while plants develop and move according to the external sun, following its direction, animals - subjects - have the sun within themselves, and move according to themselves, retaining a minimal level of reflexive identity through their movement.^[17] A cockroach has a brain, which elaborates the signals from the outside and controls the body (it produces a cognitive map of it, articulating external and internal signals etc.) as one totality. The cockroach institutes its behavioural and living unity through its brain. Clearly, this unity must disappear when the cockroach is beheaded - and yet, unlike the brain (whose functioning quickly dissolves because of the lack of inputs from the body, de facto losing its unity), the body keeps ‘living’, maintaining some form of structural integrity. But we can hardly say that it still has a ‘conscience’ - the sun is not in itself anymore, nor is it anywhere. Night falls over the body’s ‘life’.

Such a mode of ‘life’ can hardly have any adaptive explanation, as its possibility solely relies on the very anatomy of the cockroach - it is a side effect, an accidental property of how the cockroach is made. In itself, ‘surviving without a head’ is barely even a property of the body - it just does it, because of its relative indifference towards the head itself. In other words, for the body - reduced to very basic motor functions, but with breathing and circulation, and therefore metabolism, still intact - whether the head is severed or not makes no difference (nor can it feel hunger anymore).

What kind of ‘life’ is it? The body does not know it, but it is dying, its fate is sealed. We could oppose: every organism is dying, and their life is nothing but a postponement of death - as soon as they are born, they are old enough to die. And yet, organisms normally fight a battle against death, and they construct themselves in this fight, they display their adaptations, and in the case of animals, their sun shines bright within themselves. The same cannot be said for our half-cockroach. Its integrity is radically compromised, in a way that inherently negates the survival of the cockroach - nay, its very being a cockroach. What is a cockroach if not the way a cockroach is born, survives and reproduces - the way it relates to the environment, preserving its form, seeking food and escaping predators? Every action and function of the cockroach belongs to it to the extent that it reinforces its being a cockroach. But what kind of breathing is the breathing of the cockroach’s body? Does it work for the metabolism of the whole? No - in a way, it never did, as it can keep working even without the head, and its survival function only existed thanks to the preserved integrity of the body. (We could say, the relative modularity of the body parts and functions implies that such parts and functions engender the whole life of the body only if the body itself is whole.) The body’s spiracles breathe for no one, its limbs react to touch, but the cockroach is not touched. In more explicit terms, the body of the cockroach is not a cockroach, and as such, it is not the body of a cockroach. The body is not ‘alive’, in the sense that no cockroach lives ‘through’ it. Its ‘living’ is wasted. And yet, in a sense - it ‘lives’.

Are those spiracles still organs? They are properly ‘organs without a body’, if the body is the overall ὀργανικόν, the organic of the living being (see note 9). The overall organic is a whole and functioning, living as such, and therefore being what it is, only if its life is actualised as a whole (even through injuries that do not compromise its integrity: losing an eye or a limb will not dis-organise the whole body - having cancer might). An eye by itself is not an eye in any meaningful sense. However, unlike the eye left to rot by itself, despite having lost their organic ‘sense’, the activity of those spiracles is still practically the same as before the decapitation. Their activity is indifferent to the whole - unlike the whole, which needs them. They are ‘alive’ within the whole only insofar as the whole needs them, uses them, functionally colonises them, elevating their blind functioning to a higher organic level. Without the whole, they are - not ‘alive’, as no life lives through them, and yet they function.

Such a status is described by Slavoj Žižek in these terms:

 

‘the [...] “undead” organ without a body, the mythical presubjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the Life-Substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephalic” drive which persists beyond ordinary death’^[18].

 

Such a decontextualized, dying ‘life’ is, according to Žižek, life at its purest and most naked - drive, something even less than a directionless attempt at not-dying, something more than inorganic matter. Moreover, it is something remaining - it is not the missing link between inorganic matter and organismality, as if it was a basic living unit waiting to be integrated into a more complexive whole. In Hegel’s words,

 

‘the moment the lightning of life strikes into matter, at once there is present a determinate, complete creature, as Minerva fully armed springs forth from the head of Jupiter’^[19].

 

Life begins as a whole of organismality, and organs are determined and articulated only afterwards. The driving obstinacy of those spiracles is derivative of the way they developed in the context of the whole - nay, of the very way they evolved. And yet, as noticed before, it is not but a side effect - something which persists after life proper has ceased, and which is not dead yet.

Death is, infact, the pure and immediate negation of life, of its very possibility - living beings cannot be resuscitated in any meaningful sense: death is the end. As such, as it negates the very possibility of life, therefore its organic, death coincides with the reduction of the organic to the inorganic. When an animal dies, despite the illusion of structural unity (it is still warm, it retains some mechanical reflexes and so on), other forces start to prevail, tearing it apart. Decomposition begins, as the reality of the loss of unity unfolds. And yet, such a headless cockroach body is not decomposing yet, it is far from being already inorganic matter.

Such an image disgusts us, which is telling: ‘This disgust at Life is a disgust at drive at its purest’^[20]. That headless body lives a properly disgusting ‘life’, which is at the same time an uncanny exemplification of life at its most crude. What do I mean by this? This instantiation of life sussists outside of organismality, and as such, outside of evolution. It is a remnant, but at the same time, it projects a shadow over organismality. It is as if the whole of the organism could function only thanks to the inherent drive of its organs - a view which overturns the primacy of the organism over its organs that I have supported until now. As if - the total organism could not bring life into those organs, a unitary life, but only an organisation which feeds off the inherent and blind drive of those organs. The organism’s developmental modularity here does not just mean a relative autonomy of the parts, but it implies the idea that ‘life’, somehow, can sussist outside of the unity of a living being - not in grander and larger systems, but in smaller and weaker parts.

Such a ‘life’ is properly without soul (ψυχή), or without βίος: it is not ‘born’, nor it ‘lives’ to survive and reproduce (in this sense, despite their lack of metabolic functions, viruses both adapt and reproduce, and should therefore be considered living beings in the more traditional sense). On the contrary, it is pure and mere ζωή incarnate, a living cause without living effects - a leakage, a wasting, a dying out. Its status is the minimal difference between death (the inorganic reduction) and its negation - not life proper (which exists only as organismal βίος), but the very waiting for death, a death-not-yet. Such a difference is thus a mere deferral of death itself, of the end itself - the (temporal) difference between anything and its ownmost destiny of annihilation. The thing sussists, but as such that in its very being - the organ’s drive - it has already lost itself. But because of its lack of βίος, the headless body of the cockroach cannot even ‘die’ in any meaningful way. Surely, its functions can stop - it can stop breathing, reacting to stimuli etc., but no life actually ends.

This does not mean that the mutilated organ achieves a form of immortality, bringing organic functioning beyond the horizon of birth and death (or evolution, for that matter) - its drive does not achieve a higher level, a getting stuck on one finitude for the sake of its enjoyment. Such an object is not a pulsating coagulate of directionless life, nor a kind of bad infinity. Žižek describes this second concept - jouissance, or death drive, the immortal alien life of an autonomous enjoying organ - in these terms: ‘there is no Aufhebung, no resolution proper, the thing just drags on . . . [...] the wound never closes (or kills me)’^[21]. But our case is exactly the opposite: the thing does not remain in its own negativity, with no sublation, nor it ‘just drags on’ - rather, it just fades away. The wound does close, and yet the body dies.

The death of a death-less body, of a wound-less body, unable to register its own distress, suggests something fundamental about what it means for an organism to properly die, and properly live. In order to live, an organism has to be able to die, to suffer an injury that kills it - it has to have something to lose. In this sense, the cockroach does die, and it dies when its head is severed from its body, despite both the body parts continuing functioning for a certain amount of time.

Two consequences have to finally be drawn from this. Firstly, that life as βίος already implies a level of ideality - the wholeness of the organism as something more than its parts, giving sense and organisation to them -, while life as ζωή is something less, a minimal negation of death which remains only beyond biographical death. In this sense, the pulsating materiality of life (the still mechanically breathing spiracles, the weaving antennas) comes after the emergence of the ideality of life, representing however its very finitude. Its ideality is one with its fragility, so that we could reverse the traditional Christian view and state that the body survives the death of the soul. Secondly, we have to conclude that there is a trench between evolving organic life and the partial object of ‘life’. The first life form was already a life form - natura facit saltus, and when evolution kicks in, life has already started. Drawing from Stephen Jay Gould, Žižek describes how the the new ideality of life cannot be ‘evolved’, but can only emerge as a structure ex nihilo in these terms:

 

‘A vicious cycle is inescapable here: we cannot explain the very emergence of an organism in the terms of a strategy of adaptation. If an organism is to adapt in order to survive, it must be there in the first place. An organism evolves to survive, but it cannot emerge in order to survive: it is meaningless to say that I live in order to adapt myself’^[22].

 

However, the evolution of organs - the articulation of the primal, empty and formal function of merely living, βίος at its most pure - is an articulation into possibilities of death, venturing into harsher and harsher environments, risking it, delegating life to more and more complex organs. And while the organism is plastic and adapts to and accommodates the environmental insults it suffers, its organs are the ghosts of possible disorganisations and dissolutions - the possible taking over of forces, the tearing apart of life functions. Every new organ is a possibility of suffering, a new pain to overcome, and at the same time, a new deferral of death. The headless cockroach died, but the headless body faces an even eerier fate: with no possibility of even struggling to survive, it is life as it has given up on itself. It is ungrounded, fading, utterly gratuitous.

---

^[1] Rammstein, Dalai Lama, in Reise, Reise, released on Sept. 27, 2004.

^[2] See i.e. Visualising the total biomass of every animal on Earth, available on https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/total-biomass-weight-species-earth#:~:text=The%20total%20biomass%20on%20planet,of%20all%20biomass%20on%20Earth.

^[3] See i.e. How many species on Earth? 8.7 million, 2011, available on https://phys.org/news/2011-08-wild-world-millions-unseen-species.html.

^[4] See i.e. Earth May Be Home to a Trillion Species of Microbes, available on https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/science/one-trillion-microbes-on-earth.html.

^[5] Wu et al, Inter-Species Grafting Caused Extensive and Heritable Alterations of DNA Methylation in Solanaceae Plants, available on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3628911/.

^[6] See i.e. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), §§334-335.

^[7] And yet, against any common sense, Queller and Strassman consider the fig-fig wasp relation to be fully organismal (see Queller, Strassman, Beyond society: the evolution of organismality, available on https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2009.0095#ref-list-1).

^[8] See Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1983).

^[9] This conception is not much different from Aristotle’s, who states that life is the act of a natural body endowed with organs (ὀργανικόν, cfr. De Anima, B 1, 412 to 25), and that by virtue of this organic, it has the life in power (δυνάμει ζωὴν ἒχοντος, ibidem). For this reason Aristotle can state that, for example, if the eye were an animal, its soul, that is, its life, would be sight (ivi, B 1, 412 b 15). Of course, an eye is an eye only in a seeing animal, particularly, in the functional organisation of the parts that describes the overall actuality of that living being, its life.

 

^[10] In Aristotle’s case, as Heidegger famously noticed, he also thinks, between being born and dying.

^[11] See Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976).

^[12] Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), available on http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/LoserLit/zarathustra.pdf, p. 89.

^[13] Dobzhansky, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution (1973), available on https://online.ucpress.edu/abt/article-abstract/35/3/125/9833/Nothing-in-Biology-Makes-Sense-except-in-the-Light?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

^[14] The basic science of headless cockroaches is described on Scientific American, Can a Cockroach Live without its Head?, available on https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-a-cockroach-live-without-its-he/.

^[15] Ibidem.

^[16] See https://www.britannica.com/science/human-respiratory-system/Interplay-of-respiration-circulation-and-metabolism.

^[17] See Hegel, op. cit., §§350-352.

^[18] Žižek, The Parallax View (2006), pp. 117-118, my emphasis.

^[19] Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, quoted in https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/houlgate1.htm#:~:text=%E2%80%9Ceven%20if%20the%20earth%20was,head%20of%20Jupiter.

^[20] Žižek, op. cit., ibidem.

^[21] Ivi, p. 115.

^[22] Ivi, p. 199.