The book defines, conceptualizes, and evaluates the insectile pertaining to an entomological fascination in relation to subject formation. It tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, 17th century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film

1. Introduction: Insectile Subjectile

Form

2. Homme-Insecte: Form, Typus, Fetish
3. The Insectile Informe: H.P. Lovecraft and the Deliquescence of Form
4. Hotel-Daddy-Wasp-Machine

Informe

5. Othered Form and Insectile Subjectile: Under the Skin
6. Relations of the Third Kind
7. Still Life as Extinction Event
8. Coda: Wolfman, Vienna, Larva

Bibliography

Index

Fabienne Collignon is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests are critical theory, in particular theories of technology, subject formation, the 'in-human'. She has published articles in Textual Practice, C-Theory, Journal of American Studies, Orbit, Configurations, New Formations. Her first monograph, Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014 and maps the technological unconscious of the Cold War. From September 2018 to February 2020, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Universität zu Köln, during which time she researched scenes of the insectile.