In Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants: what is unthinkable, invisible, counts as walls, what qualifies as a stipule, calyces, the axis point of petals, tepals, sepals. It is observational surgery. Autopsies are, in general, well-meaning. But this is the cleanest violence I have ever witnessed against stems and leaves. Nothing transpires, nothing breathes. Yet Metamorphosis, in its discarded mercy, is a flawless saboteur of ignorance. All daylight. No chloroplast is spared his equations and, in doing so, undergoes a resurrection. This violence—though clean—is colonial, and however curious, is irreducible beyond perversion. Like the burning of olive trees, of the people who belong to them, this too, is colonial, is irreducibly perverse. And yet it must be reduced. Eradicated. It must.
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