Insect Ethics and Aesthetics: ‘Their blood does not stain our hands’

This chapter tracks the flying and scurrying of disparate unpinned insects, emphasising both their instrumental and intrinsic value, and the necessity of supplementing empathetic with non-empathetic approaches when thinking and writing with them. It examines three figures of the insect: the first, the insect as other other in Damien Hirst’s work, exposes the limitations of empathetic responses to nonhuman life. The second, the queer insect, draws on Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Darwin, Roger Caillois’s interpretation of mimicry and Lee Edelman’s work in queer theory to argue that the insect provides a figure of the inhuman that counters logics of heteronormative futurity. The final figure, that of the disgusting insect, is generated through Rosi Braidotti’s reading of Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion of G.H. and Derrida’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The chapter concludes by advancing disgust as a useful tool in the development of inhuman ethics.