Daisy Lafarge’s Lovebug is an extremely impressive and complex exploration of pathogens and takes a semiotic, psychoanalytic lens to look at how we could come to view and experience microbial life (pathogens, bacteria, viruses, bugs) as not the “bad” to a “good” counterpart (human, love) but to see both - that is, love and bugs - as made of the same stuff.
Lovebug draws heavily upon epidemiology and microbiology and using language and poetics as a tool to disassemble assumptions and instincts. Lafarge proposes a more harmonious coexistence, one informed by a Kleinian depressive position (as opposed to a paranoid one) whereby we learn to live and cope with/endure ambivalence and think differently about how we fear or respond to the abject other not as a threat but as something likened to us. Sutured throughout this book are themes of merging/splitting, mirroring, attachment, love, hate, terror, rejection, consumption, violence, sex, illness, death, cannibalism, inside/outside, self/other, metaphor and materiality. Definitely a book to read, enjoy and think about again, and then again.
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