Virality Vitality, by Jonathan Basile

Reviewed by Ian James

Jonathan Basile, Virality Vitality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025), xx + 252 pp.

Virality Vitality. The absence of a comma separating these two terms might suggest a complex relation between them, not one of a simple listing or coordination but perhaps rather a relation of equivalence or identity. Yet, as with Derrida’s La Vie la mort, translated into English of course as Life Death, the absence of any logical connector or punctuation separating the viral and the vital here also suggests a conceptual instability or destabilisation according to which any possible equivalence or identity may also and simultaneously indicate an impossibility of equivalence, a non-identity of both terms with each other and with themselves. The question of whether viruses are alive or can be classed as living entities is one, of course, that perplexes and divides biologists. Viruses, having no metabolism of their own, rely on that of their hosts to make copies of themselves and therefore to survive and replicate. Would this mean that they are alive when occupying a host cell but otherwise dead when not doing so? That cannot exactly be so since they would not then be able to respond, like any living organism, to environmental cues, which in this case would allow them to identify and occupy a host and thereby continue the viral cycle of copying and replicating. Also, and as the biologist and thinker of life Nick Lane has questioned, ‘is metabolic activity a necessary attribute of life?’ In the end the virus shows us, Lane argues, that ‘there is a continuum between the living and the non-living, and it is pointless to try to draw a line across it’.^[1] It is this uncertain space between the living and the non-living that the virus occupies which orientates the arguments of Basile’s book. Rather than a continuum between life and non-life, though, he discerns in the virus an irreducible undecidability that has the most far-reaching implications and consequences. ‘Why’, he asks at the very outset, ‘when we attempt to define life, does it end up resembling a virus, and why, when we attempt to define the virus, does it infect “life itself”?’ (viii). Virality Vitality might therefore suggest, initially at least, an identity or at least a structural cross contamination of the two terms allowing for strong, seemingly ontological claims such as: ‘We are viral from before the beginning’ (viii) or: ‘There is no life without some virality’ (172). And yet the irreducibly undecidable status of the virus at the very same time destabilises such ontological claims. We are viral from the beginning only because ‘once a thing’s identity depends on repetition it always repeats for self and other at once’ (viii). In being itself, the living is also not itself. Likewise, if there is no life without virality, by the same token there is ‘no pure life, no spontaneous or autonomous selfhood. In the same breath, it is necessary to say there has never been a true virus’ (172).

Readers of Derrida and those with even a passing familiarity with deconstruction will immediately recognise some of its key terms in these formulations: undecidability, repetition or iterability, and non-self-identity. Basile’s book very explicitly situates itself within the burgeoning field of bio-deconstruction which carries over Derridean thinking into the domains of the life sciences and of contemporary biology. The work of Francesco Vitale has featured most prominently and seminally in this field (notably his 2018 book Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences) as has work by collaborators such as Eszter Timar and Erin Obodiac.^[2] It is important to signal at this stage that biodeconstruction’s carrying over of Derridean thought into the domain of biology has produced an approach which is sharply different from the alignments of Deleuzian philosophy with different areas of scientific knowledge. Keith Ansell-Pearson’s works of the late 1990s Viroid Life, and Germinal Life, might be cited here, as might work by Manuel DeLanda (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy), or John Protevi. More broadly one might also cite the Deleuze inspired ontologies of posthumanism (e.g. Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman) and new materialism (e.g. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, the ‘vital materialism’ of which Basile is highly critical). The nature of this sharp difference, and its importance, is explored in more detail below. At the same time the general approach of biodeconstruction can be seen to complement, or be allied with, the work of other contemporary thinkers and contexts, e.g. Catherine Malabou’s thinking of neuroplasticity and epigenetics (in texts such as Que faire de notre cerveau? and Avant demain: Épigenèse et rationalité), Peircean inspired biosemiotics (in particular the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer), and certain recent developments in biologically oriented feminism (Elizabeth Wilson’s Psychosomatic feminism and the Neurological Body and Gut Feminism).

Perhaps the most decisive move of biodeconstruction is to highlight and further develop the ways in which key Derridean terms such as ‘trace’ or ‘arche-writing’ do not limit themselves to the sphere of human meaning inscription, intentional consciousness, or textuality. Although Derrida might start from the perspective of phenomenology, and its Husserlian form in particular, his thinking does not remain exclusively tethered to this phenomenological starting point and its human-centred orientation. Despite some equivocations perhaps, there is ample evidence for this in Derrida’s writing itself, for example, and most notably or course, in La Vie la mort, but also in certain passages of De la grammatologie and in the essay ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ in L’Écriture et la différence. Derrida’s movement across and then beyond phenomenology is brilliantly accounted for in Vitale’s Biodeconstruction, where the arguments for an understanding of the biological genesis of arche-writing, its inscription in and as the history of life, and for all deconstructive implications of this for both life and the life-sciences are made at great length.^[3] Basile also takes this non-anthropocentric understanding of the trace and of arche-writing as a starting point, citing a less well-known text by Derrida: ‘The concept of trace, I say it in a word because this would require long developments, has no limit, it is coextensive with the experience of the living in general. Not only human life, but of the living in general. Animals trace, every living being traces’ (Derrida, Trace et archive, cited xiv).

The importance of Basile’s work lies in the manner in which he takes up the problematic of virality in order to map it onto the key operations of deconstruction. In this way he in turn reposes, and in a highly original manner, fundamental questions relating to both epistemology and ontology, but also to the ethics and politics of practices within the life sciences. Thus undecidability, iterability, and non-identity (already mentioned) are mobilised alongside a recasting of other deconstructive terms onto the terrain of the biological and according to the logic of virality. The list of these terms is long: the trace, the quasi-transcendental, non-oppositional difference, improper propriety, immunity, contextuality, the immemorial, spectrality and haunting, and with these terms an affirmation of both the withdrawal of any stable ontological ground and the rupturing or destabilisation of any and every instance of presence. So, from early on in Virality Vitality, it is argued that the trace is a quasi-transcendental condition of the living: ‘all the effects of the trace that have always been at work in and as life, making it possible and impossible’ (8). This leads to an understanding of virality as the haunting of biological beings by the trace of the other, of life by death: ‘[Life] from the first can only be instituted as a haunting trace that out-lives or sur-vives any given form. One could call this trace of life virality, the holding in suspense of borders of life-death and self-other’ (8). This in turn places virality as a substitute term for iterability: ‘virality is that strange reproducibility and in-formability that allows for what-is to be repeated by what it most is not, which I am calling here trace or iterability’ (8). It follows from this that virality will therefore also be an operation of non-oppositional difference and of the destabilisation of propriety, borders, and binaries: ‘There is nothing more essential to virality than this, that the viral is what first makes the proper boundaries of life and the literal intelligible by displacing and corrupting them’ (33).

This short selection of quotations gives a brief initial overview of the ways in which Basile maps virality and vitality onto the operations of deconstruction and the thinking of deconstruction onto the field of the living and of the life sciences. At this point it might be worth stepping back a little to pose a more general question of what this decisive and unequivocal shift of deconstructive thought away from its starting point in phenomenology and onto the domain of biological life in general might signify. Insofar as it would remain within the orbit of phenomenology and of the deconstruction of phenomenological presence Derridean thought may in some sense be said to be tied to the human and to human intentional consciousness. The deconstruction of presence would, at the very same time, take in the deconstruction of existential ontology and of Heideggerian being. Shifting arche-writing onto biological life in such a way that one can now speak of the ‘text of the living’ might, since we are no longer speaking from the perspective of human meaning and consciousness, raise the question of whether or not some kind of hard ontological claim is being made about the ‘being’ of life understood as textual. The risk is that some kind of metaphysical baggage may find itself smuggled into deconstructive thought by the back door as it were. The risk is also that such baggage might bring with it a fall into biologism, the view that philosophical questions can be answered with reference to biological principles that are thereby posed as an ontological ground. Such a risk is highlighted by Derrida himself in relation to his readings of François Jacob in La Vie la mort. Taking a biological framework as a master model for life as such, he notes at the beginning of the seventh séance of La Vie la mort, would indeed amount to biologism. This poses the question of the extent to which his own deconstructive reading of Jacob and genetics nevertheless may be relying on biological principles that are not only historically contingent, but which may also, as he says in a later séance, very soon be ‘périmée’ and entail the collapse of the whole deconstructive argument. As Derrida himself puts it: “n’ai-je pas cédé moi-même à un tel biologisme en affirmant que […] le texte comme vie ou la vie comme texte n’étaient pas des modèles parmi d’autres, ce qui revient peut-être à en faire le modèle ultime ?”.^[4] Derrida appears to be acutely aware that, if he were to pursue the possibility of extending writing and text to the logic of life as such and if he were to rely on contemporary biology to do so, he would run the risk of biologism and all that that may imply, that is to say, the affirmation of what in the end are ontological claims whose very deconstruction necessarily relies and depends upon an epistemological model which is historical, local, contingent.

So clearly, and as I have also argued elsewhere, Derrida has his own reservations and hesitations regarding the risk that may be run when the operations of deconstructive thought are mapped onto the field of the living.^[5] For reasons that Basile himself makes clear, and as will be explored further below, it is important that these risks are negotiated very carefully within biodeconstructive thought. Of course, and as is well established, when thinking with or after Derrida it may always be the case that any act of fidelity is also necessarily an infidelity, that any ‘proper’ deconstructive gesture is always also simultaneously struck by impropriety. Yet within this double bind a certain deconstructive rigour is nevertheless necessary in order to avoid the retention or carry over of unthought excess metaphysical baggage and the concomitant risk of a biologistic ontologization of life. Everything in biodeconstruction will hang, therefore, on how its thinking articulates and maintains this necessary deconstructive rigour. It is a matter of exactly how thought comes to think, in Basile’s words, ‘the dependence of knowledge and being on something like a trace’ (16). In a sense not much changes in the shift from the deconstruction of (human) intentional consciousness, presence, and meaning to the wider domain of the living. Both epistemology and ontology, knowledge and being, are drawn into the logic of possibility and impossibility that governs all that is dependent on something like a trace. So biodeconstruction, whatever ontological claims it appears to make about biological life, is making claims that repeat those of deconstruction that are made in relation to (human) textuality, writing, etc. Biodeconstruction can never nor will ever be a simple, stable ontology of life.

Basile’s account of virality and vitality negotiates the risks of biodeconstruction, and deploys the necessary deconstructive rigour as he does so, in an exemplary and admirable manner. This is because he is at all times, when he addresses different issues pertaining to biological life and to the life sciences, attentive to quasi-transcendental conditions of possibility-impossibility, limits and delimitation, definition and undecidability, and so on. Each and every biological issue he deals with teases out the rigour of this specific deconstructive logic. Perhaps most immediately and importantly he addresses very directly the question of origins in biological being and in our knowledge of it, discerning the extent to which the question of origin simultaneously imposes itself and renders itself unanswerable across a range of fundamental questions within the life sciences. So, for instance, questions of evolution, speciation, and filiation are particularly enmeshed with the question of origin. Rather than address these according to any specific ontological concept, for instance vitality or the vital as a governing principle of life secure in its identity as an idea, Basile consistently thinks according to the deconstructive doubling of virality vitality and all that it entails. In this way the terms and structures of biological thinking are shown to be caught up in all sorts of constitutive aporia which make any simple ontological, categorial, or conceptual foundations, and claims that might be made upon those foundations, unstable. As always in deconstruction, the withdrawal of any stable origin is everywhere at play and this is no less so for Basile’s version of biodeconstruction: the ‘ana-originary or anoriginary origin makes all proper or improper filiations both possible and impossible by making them descend from what is in principle heterogeneous to essence’ (51). What this means is that, rather than be grounded in the positive ontological or epistemological claims that might be made with regard to biological life in general or to this or that aspect of it, the force of biodeconstruction, as with all deconstruction, lies in the way it inhabits or steps back into, the field of forces and meanings that can be discerned within that life, its texts and contexts, human and non-human alike. The force of biodeconstruction lies in the way it reads or understands the constitutive aporia and viral logic of that field. It is a question of the ways in which the effects of virality are discerned within biological life and within the discourse of the life sciences respectively.

So, for instance, the following two quotations demonstrate the operation of virality across the domain of the biological as an operation that repeats Derrida’s logic of ‘iterability’:

Without appearing anywhere, neither at the origin nor external to it, some virality counter-signs everything, is written into the codes and texts that can neither reveal nor refuse it. (106)

the virality or iterability that countersigns life, matter, and nature leaves a non-oppositional difference ‘within’ what therefore no longer has a simple inside, and categories such as life and the inorganic, or being and thinking, emerge from its abyss to temporarily stabilize its haunting undecidability. (107)

Between them these two quotations illustrate the deconstructive logic that can be discerned in, or ‘read out of’, both the processes of biological life understood as textual or coded and the categorial or structural organization of scientific biological discourse. Both the ontology and epistemology of life are destabilized by virality but only, to repeat, insofar as the practitioner of biodeconstruction steps back into the viral logic of life to discern its effects. In this way deconstruction will once again be something that happens when we, either as philosophical thinkers, biological theorists, or indeed also as practising biological scientists, encounter life in its contexts, specificities, and complexities. Biodeconstruction, then, will be a matter of reading and interpretation on the part of both philosopher-theorist and scientist alike, as Basile himself concludes:

Whether it is pictured as mechanistic or aesthetic (feeling), what we call nature or life involves an iterability that makes mechanical recognition or law ultimately undecidable – it is only by something like an act of reading that the cell forms alliances and disalliances, and welcomes certain substances while rejecting or breaking down others, in that it can only be identified as will or law if it repeats, and this is necessarily open to an immemorial past and a future that has never finished arriving. This natural lection is the true subject of study for the natural scientist, who is thus only ever engaged in the reading of an act of reading – like all the living, like all life-science. (133)

From the level of at least the cell upwards life is always, always already, a matter of reading, human discourse, meaning, and with that the specific practices of both biology and biodeconstruction are no less so. Basile’s elaboration of the notion of ‘natural lection’ underpins all the original achievements of his book and has far-reaching consequences for both biology and deconstructive thought or practice.

The importance of thinking ‘natural lection’ as the guiding operation of both the natural scientist and the practitioner of biodeconstruction is twofold. Firstly, it shows the manner in which biodeconstruction as a theoretical and philosophical orientation is decisively different from other re-castings of the relation between philosophy and science in the ‘continental’ tradition and in wake of postmodernism. Secondly, and relatedly, the practice of natural lection gives an entirely different ethico-political inflection than can arguably found in the wider constellation of ecocritical, new materialist, or posthuman discourses.

It may be worth recalling that certain Deleuzian influenced tendencies in recent thought have underlined the importance of a ‘materialist’ turn, in part at least, through claims relating to the supposed textualism of deconstruction and the limitations of this. Rosi Braidotti in her seminal 2013 work, The Posthuman, is, although very respectfully, perhaps exemplary in this regard: ‘I have great respect for deconstruction, but also some impatience with the limitations of its linguistic frame of reference. I prefer to take a more materialist route to deal with the complexities of the post human’.^[6] Although this plays to a certain popular reception and criticism of Derridean thought, the charge of linguisticism and of an accompanying abstraction or lack of materiality is no doubt one which Derrida would have vigorously defended against. In particular, one can imagine Derrida’s scepticism at the identification of any ‘materialism’ that could be placed in a stable binary opposition with abstraction, ideality, or idealism. From the deconstructive point of view any move to an ontological materialism would be both all too easy as well as all too obviously problematic. Basile’s argument against such a move is trenchant and uncompromising:

there is no materialism that could contain the operation of a virus, any more than a vitalism or any other ontology […]. Virality disturbs any effort to bring nature or being within first principles, not because it arrives from outside the origin […] but because it simulates originality itself without ever belonging to it. (18)

The distance that Basile places here between biodeconstruction and all the variants of new ontology or materialism that have emerged over the last two decades or so could not be more evident. Given that the turn towards materialism and away from ‘textualism’ has arguably so often been made with the aim of orientating theoretical and philosophical thought towards ethico-political imperatives, the question arises as to why the distance Basile places between the variants of this turn and biodeconstruction really matters. Once again, the key issue relates to the dangers of reifying, substantialising, or returning an assured self-identity to foundational concepts or gestures of thought. Here the virus or virality destabilises the principles that have governed recent materialist thought. One might cite here the concept of the ‘entanglement’ of agency and matter (Barad) or their unification in an ontological principle such as the ‘vital’ (Bennett). Indeed, strictly speaking it is virality understood as an operation whose effects are readable and not at all the identity of an entity that is at play here:

It is not the virus that entangles nature and culture or the material and the semiotic, because such a thinking can only appear to complicate these borders if they have been already set in place by decisions that are neither innocent nor absolute, and whose deconstruction displaces any supposed positivity or agency of the virus, its matter, and everything else. (5)

As this makes clear, the charge that deconstruction returns to new materialism would be that, in its celebration of the transgression of borders and boundaries on the basis of its reformed reinvention of metaphysical and ontological principles or forms, it ends up reifying and naturalising them, thereby reinstating the problematic hierarchies and identities it seeks to overturn. Basile again: ‘The risk of celebrating such border-crossings is always that one will reify and naturalize the underlying borders in the process’ (5). The risk here is, then, one of theory opening the door to a return to the very identity politics it contests and with this to the recuperation of such politics by reactionary forces.

The counter-charge that can, and of course has, been made against deconstruction in general is that, in keeping open the instability and undecidability of concepts, foundations, and truth claims, it in turn keeps the door wide open for relativism. In so doing it would thereby remove the ground upon which ethico-political commitment can enact itself in the passage from theoretical insight to concerted worldly intervention. It is worth noting that biodeconstruction, as a practice, aims firstly to intervene in the area of the life sciences and that of biological knowledge and research. As Francesco Vitale has put it, for biodeconstruction ‘it is a matter of helping research to free itself from the subtle but powerful constraints of metaphysics through understanding and deconstructing the conditioning that it has produced and continues to produce, albeit unnoticed as such, through its rhetorical-conceptual apparatus’.^[7] Virality Vitality, across its chapters and arguments, reaffirms this view and refutes the charge of relativism:

Rather than casting all commitments to the truth and the ethico-affective into an abyss, deconstruction destabilises the terrain whose fixity might seem to offer grounds for disinterested and objective research – all science, as well as any text that speaks of science as if from outside, takes place within a scene of family relations and inheritance that is as affectively charged as any other. (68)

So, rather than distancing the philosopher, theorist, and practitioner from point of intervention and engagement, stranding it upon the shorelines of undecidability and the quiescence of relative truth claims, biodeconstruction, far from endorsing abstraction, places them back into specific interventions within specific contexts with the ethico-political imperative of discerning within fields of force the constitutive aporias of meaning that structure those fields at key points. In this way it motivates further interventions, actions, judgments, and decisions that will take place at the site of those key points.

It is this ethico-political imperative that shapes the details of the arguments which make up each of Basile’s five chapters. Each addresses specific questions which range from the fundamental and general to the more regionally localised and relating to contemporary practices within biology. So, the first chapter addresses the concept of the ‘tree of life’ that is so central to biological thinking concerning questions of evolution, speciation, and filiation (alluded to above). Basile, here, demonstrates the ways in which multiple pathways of gene transfer, aided and abetted by viruses at the bacterial level and beyond, undermines attempts to secure direct lines of descent and relation and therewith also any stable framework oriented to the horizontal and vertical which would give meaning to the tree of life metaphor. It is worth noting here that what is unfolding in such an argument is not the promotion of a rhizomatic conceptual model that would act as a somehow more positive metaphysical means of renewing an ontology of living relations. Rather what is at stake is a demonstration, an interpretation, a reading of a fundamental aspect of the way in which scientific thought has come to understand the living. What is at stake is not a reformed metaphysics but rather an understanding of structural complexity, its conditions of possibility and impossibility and the implications of this for how knowledge might proceed and develop in specific ways once this structural complexity is recognised or discerned.

The second and third chapters explore the instabilities that attend attempts to conceptualise the virus as such. The former examines the difficulties of defining viruses as agents of heredity or of contagion and does so through a detailed examination of their relation to bacteria. The third chapter looks at the history of virology and the vexed question of when, exactly, the virus as such was discovered. In each case, and in very specific and localized terms concerning firstly a biological problem and secondly a problem within the history of biology, the virus emerges as something that is extremely difficult, if not structurally impossible, to define in any stable or unequivocal manner. Again, it emerges that there is no virus ‘as such’. All the seemingly more programmatic deconstructive statements or claims relating to ‘the virus’ and its undecidability (statements and claims which, as we have seen, inform Basile’s book as a whole) find themselves derived from readings within the life sciences and their history, rather than from ontological first principles.

The final two chapters direct themselves towards issues within contemporary scientific practice in which the question of life, and its possibilities of definition, is a central preoccupation. The first of these deals with attempts to create synthetic life (in particular the efforts of J. Craig Venter and teams working out of the institute that bears his name) using technologies elaborated out of the human genome project. The ability to synthesise DNA based on code stored in computers and, on this basis, to ‘manufacture’ cells with living properties poses questions that go to the heart of debates within biology as to what constitutes life in general and as such (information, reproducibility, etc.). Similar fundamental questions are posed in the fifth and final chapter in relation to the attempts within so-called ‘de-extinction’ science to revive extinct species. Here, elements of extinct species’ DNA are inserted into the embryos of related and still surviving species. In this context questions are posed concerning the identity of species and whether this can be located within the genome or also within environmentally influenced epigenetic factors that regulate gene expression. All the preoccupations of biodeconstruction are at play in these discussions and, once again, are so based on detailed reading and interpretation of specific contexts and cases within biological thought and practice. Also, in the context of synthetic and de-extinction biology, what comes into the foreground is the relation of scientific activity to those worldly contexts that would go under the name of politics, economics, institutionalised science, and the power relations of contemporary techno-capitalism. Here Basile shows convincingly and compellingly that the politics of deconstruction always lies in its discernment of structural lines of meaning and force that shape specific contexts and which demand ethico-political understanding and decision.

Overall, then, Basile’s book deserves recognition as a major contribution to the contemporary literature of biodeconstruction. But it is also exemplary of the manner in which biodeconstruction can intervene in an original and important way within the philosophical or conceptual fundamentals of biological theory and the ethics and politics of biological practice. There are, no doubt, many biologists who wish to turn to philosophy and the work of philosophers to better understand the implications and wider importance of their work. This may particularly be so in areas where there is so much dogmatic doctrine and economic interest at play. In this context, the biodeconstructive work of Basile and that of others, like Vitale, deserves to be read. One also gets the sense, reading Virality Vitality, of the ongoing importance of Derrida’s legacy and of the way in which this legacy can offer a useful corrective to some of the tendencies within philosophy in the wake of postmodernism and in the context of the so-called ‘ontological turn’. Similarly, the inventiveness of Basile’s book reminds us that Derrida’s legacy needs to remain open and not restricted by attempts to ensure forms of fidelity to a body of thought that has always questioned the terms in which any gesture of fidelity might first be judged. Thus, Basile’s work should, arguably, be allied, not just with those works that form the emergent canon of biodeconstruction, but also with a range of recent and contemporary work that situates itself with the domain of the life sciences and that inherits more broadly from the post-deconstructive moment. There is a wider field here that also places a key emphasis upon something like the reading and interpretation of life, upon ‘natural lection’, rather than seeking new forms of ontological ground.^[8] The open, plural, and above all ceaselessly inventive recasting of Derridean thought, such as one finds in Basile’s book, offers no better way of securing its legacy in both the present and the future.

1. Nick Lane, The Vital Question (London: Profile Books, 2015), p. 53, p. 55. ↑

2. Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, trans. Mauro Senatore (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018). ↑

3. See, in particular, Vitale, Biodconstruction, pp. 7-52, 103-26. ↑

4. Jacques Derrida, La Vie la mort (Paris: Seuil, 2019), p. 182. ↑

5. Ian James, ‘On Deconstruction and Struction’, in Jacques Derrida: Memorie a-venire, Trópos. Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica – vol. 18 (2025), n. 2. ↑

6. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 30. ↑

7. Francesco Vitale, ‘The Tropic-Concepts of Life: Jacques Derrida’s Contribution to the Question of Metaphor in the Life Sciences’ in ‘Post-deconstructive thought and biological theory’, Paragraph, special issue, 47:3, 271. ↑

8. One might think here of those friends colleagues or former students of Derrida all of whom shift the order of sense and meaning onto other sites (existential, technological), notably Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler, as well as, in relation to biology, Catherine Malabou and her elaboration of what she has called ‘epigenetic reading’ in works such as Avant demain: Épigenèse et rationalité (2015). Critical-theoretical work around the contemporary science of biosemiotics might also be mentioned here, in particular what I have termed ‘post-dicative’ reading (on this see Ian James, Rethinking Literary Naturalism: Proust and Quignard After Life (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025), in particular chapter one, ‘Biosemiotics and the Post-dicative’, pp. 23-58). Also the work around biological thinking of scholars such as James Martell and Adam Rosenthal could be mentioned in this regard along with many other no doubt. ↑