Emanuele Coccia is a French philosopher of Italian descent, whose perspective explores the broader meaning, both cognitive and social, of recent biological research, and who does so in an unusually poetic and figurative style.

Coccia's Metamorphoses (Métamorphoses, 2020) is available in Estonian and presents Coccia as a kind of animistic thinker who perceives the essential similarity of organisms behind their bodily differences.

This similarity is manifested in the vitality that is transferred from one body to another, constantly repeating itself as a continuity of transformations, but also acquiring new forms. Through this description of life force, Coccia seeks to formulate a new, relational thinking that no longer distinguishes life forms so much in terms of development, but simply in terms of transition to each other. Metamorphosis is the association of all life forms, relation in the broadest sense of the word.

Thus, in Coccia's vision, the transcendental divine will is replaced by the ever-tactile life force expressed in every plant and animal. 

Emanuele Coccia's full discussion with Estonian artist and photographer Peeter Laurits can be viewed via the video player above.

More videos with authors at the HeadRead Festival from 2025 and previous years can be found here.

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