This book by Andreas Suchantke is about insects, but it also opens up a door to realms that go beyond entomology. Suchantke focuses on the morphology of insects. He takes morphology in a broad sense to include not only their forms, shapes, patterns, and colors, but also their behaviors, development, and lifecycles. In other words, he brings us back to our senses, to the concrete and manifold appearances of beetles, butterflies, bees, and their kin.

These sensible manifestations are, for Suchantke, a "script, a language of forms, which we must learn to read." His work is not a schematic or comprehensive overview of entomology. It does not propose or defend a general theory, model, or hypotheses whereby we might explain this or that feature of insects. It is, rather, an exploration of the language of nature. He gives the reader not just new things to see, but a new way of seeing; not just a panoply of interesting, but mute or "brute," entomological facts, but new living ideas. His hope is that by exploring and cultivating such living ideas, we might learn to allow the appearances of insects to become their own language and to speak to us.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1:  Insects — An Introductory Sketch

2:  Threefold Organization as an Overarching Formative Principle

3:  Vertebrate and Arthropod: Here Head, There Thorax

4:  Dominance of the Thorax in Insects

5:  Expansion and Contraction: Polarity of Formative Gestures in Butterfly and Beetle

6:  Kinship with Light and the World of Plants

7:  The Habitat Patterns of Butterflies

8:  Free and Bound Forces: The “Perfect Insect” — The Honey Bee

9:  The Bodily Organization of the Human Being and Insects: A Comparison