Chapter 1 - Spider as bad genre

For Bataille, the formless is a spider.

’[F]ormless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. … [A]ffirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’

In what lies the arachnidity of formlessness? If it is that the spider ‘gets itself squashed everywhere’, the spider is formless in its bad telos, rather than its quotidian continuance – and genres (of which formlessness is one) should rather be as much their everydays as their exceptions. A spider’s uncrushedness is stained by its to-be-crushedness, certainly, but so is everything’s. Is a (crushable) spider, then, really more formless than, say, a (crushable) piano?

Merely because of a somewhat higher frequency of encrushment? Is so generative a category as Formlessness really a byproduct of human arachnophobic prejudice, a prometheanism of cowards?

Chapter 2 - What the Bataille saw.

The comparison with the spit-spatter suggests otherwise. In its radial leglike spray the salival formlessness insinuates that it is in the spider’s shape that its negative quiddity inheres. But Bataille has been misled by too-brief a glimpse. Nothing chitinous is formless. Nothing. In their segmented rigidity all such are a-amorphous: they are sets of excess specificity, hypertrophically edged and sectioned.

Bataille saw 8 legs and a critical mass of body, and jumped to a conclusion. But spiders, like insects, are functions of surplus formedness. What he saw and mistook, though ‘it is spiderlike’, has no specificity,

It is ‘[a] glutinous mass possessed of a will.’ It is ‘a spectre sun.’

Formlessness - of course - is an octopus.