While unicellular microbes such as phytoplankton (marine algae) have long been considered immortal unless eaten by predators, recent research suggests that under specific conditions entire populations of phytoplankton actively kill themselves; their assumed atemporality is being revised as marine ecologists recognize phytoplankton’s important role in the global carbon cycle. Drawing on empirical research into programmed cell death in marine microbes, this article explores how, in their study of microbial death, scientists change not only our understanding of microbial temporality, but also (...) reconstruct the relationship between life and death, biological individuality and assumptions about a natural teleology associated with bounded biological systems and genetic programmes. Reading this research together with a Derridean deconstruction of the limit between human and other animals with respect to death, this article explores how the deconstruction of individuality from within biology may suggest alternatives to our anthropocentric notion of time and embodiment. (shrink)

In ancient philosophy life has priority: non-living matter is made intelligible by living activity. The modern evolutionary synthesis reverses this priority: life is a passive result of blind, non-living material processes. But recent work in science and philosophy puts that reversal in question, by emphasizing how living beings are self-organizing and active. “Naturalizing” this new emphasis on living activity requires not simply a return to ancient philosophy but a new ontology, a new concept of nature. To explore that ontology, I (...) draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, studying the link between the organism and its environment, the body and the world, as reflecting a nature in which things are already linked in a moving whole. I focus on the topics of expression and movement, putting Merleau-Ponty into conversation with recent discussions in philosophy of science, especially in immunology and in evolutionary theory, and attending to Bergsonian and Hegelian threads in the background of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. (shrink)