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Where Does a Body Begin?: Biology's function in Contemporary Capitalism
All this talk of Biopolitics and yet rarely is a biologist consulted.
This is a limited run printing of a book entitled "Where does a body begin? Biology's Function in Contemporary Capitalism", written anonymously by the infamous "Meltdown Your Books" a.k.a "S.R.", who has written this book as a part of her Ph.D studies in Evolutionary Biology (with a focus on Mathematical modelling).
The book's title "Where does a body begin?" asks a question that begins to reveal some of the issues faced in the field of Biology, namely the difficulty with which contemporary Biology has in determining the limits of the body, or rather what constitutes the body and what doesn't: where, precisely, is the body? Where does it begin?
The book begins with an anonymous contribution from one of our closest affiliates, i0 xen0, our favourite transsexual post-doc whose dissertation work also considered the philosophy and history of science and the use of computational modeling in scientific practice, has constructed a contents page in prose that aims to help the reader find a comfortable position with which to begin reading the text. This introduction is framed around a question that is equally as interesting as the book title: "When is a body?", and as this title implies, the piece dwells on the idea of the temporality of the body through a look at such ideas as Kairotic time and bodily seasons.
We are presenting here a very fun, yet rigorously peer-reviewed and intellectual work from a Ph.D scholar who has a renowned sense of humor and a unique voice, that is supported by another fantastic artist and thinker from another universe. To cap it off, the book is illustrated by Rachel Lillim, whose visual style is so compelling and intense that it helps everyone see the work for what it is: otherworldly, playful and queer, but deadly serious and radical at the same time. It's a biology text about the body put together by a team of those who are, by and large, under-represented in the field.
This is a limited run printing of a book entitled "Where does a body begin? Biology's Function in Contemporary Capitalism", written anonymously by the infamous "Meltdown Your Books" a.k.a "S.R.", who has written this book as a part of her Ph.D studies in Evolutionary Biology (with a focus on Mathematical modelling).
The book's title "Where does a body begin?" asks a question that begins to reveal some of the issues faced in the field of Biology, namely the difficulty with which contemporary Biology has in determining the limits of the body, or rather what constitutes the body and what doesn't: where, precisely, is the body? Where does it begin?
The book begins with an anonymous contribution from one of our closest affiliates, i0 xen0, our favourite transsexual post-doc whose dissertation work also considered the philosophy and history of science and the use of computational modeling in scientific practice, has constructed a contents page in prose that aims to help the reader find a comfortable position with which to begin reading the text. This introduction is framed around a question that is equally as interesting as the book title: "When is a body?", and as this title implies, the piece dwells on the idea of the temporality of the body through a look at such ideas as Kairotic time and bodily seasons.
We are presenting here a very fun, yet rigorously peer-reviewed and intellectual work from a Ph.D scholar who has a renowned sense of humor and a unique voice, that is supported by another fantastic artist and thinker from another universe. To cap it off, the book is illustrated by Rachel Lillim, whose visual style is so compelling and intense that it helps everyone see the work for what it is: otherworldly, playful and queer, but deadly serious and radical at the same time. It's a biology text about the body put together by a team of those who are, by and large, under-represented in the field.
- GenresBiology
116 pages, Paperback
Published December 1, 2023
12 people are currently reading
64 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 13, 2024
I purposely reviewed the wrong book because this one wasn't on Goodreads at the time, so just moving my review over:
It's a must-read for biologists, but I'm giving it 3.5/5 simply because I'm not a biologist so didn't get everything could've gotten from this book.
Also, I burnt the book with the matches that came with it. Burning stuff is kinda boring, ngl. Don't know if I'd do it again.
It's a must-read for biologists, but I'm giving it 3.5/5 simply because I'm not a biologist so didn't get everything could've gotten from this book.
Also, I burnt the book with the matches that came with it. Burning stuff is kinda boring, ngl. Don't know if I'd do it again.
December 21, 2025
Honestly, it’s not an especially new argument, and you can find similar points across plenty of other publications that deal with the boundaries of the body and its relationship to Capital. That said, what makes this book feel somewhat fresher is its discussion of systems biology (rather than synthetic biology) as a way of thinking through the limitations of what we mean by “the body”, and of contemporary biology—within university research in particular—as something that repeatedly runs up against the structures of Capital, from funding and institutions to the production of value.
It slightly reminds me of Latour’s earlier work in the sociology of science, though the scope here is narrower and more focused on biology (and it also echoes, a little, Feyerabend’s Against Method, in a way that can be applied to biology). The section on autopoiesis is also interesting, especially when linked to the two strands of cybernetic evolution—first-order and second-order—in order to examine how biology, at the level of ontology, defines what a body is and turns it into a kind of information machine. This is also where second-order cybernetics becomes more compelling, because the observer—in this case, the body—enters the system and becomes entangled in the feedback struggle.
Even so, my main takeaway is that, much like other theoretical arguments that are more or less inspired by Landian philosophy, the book ultimately offers an extremely vague account of the relationship between the body and Capital. There’s no clear, challenging argument.
It slightly reminds me of Latour’s earlier work in the sociology of science, though the scope here is narrower and more focused on biology (and it also echoes, a little, Feyerabend’s Against Method, in a way that can be applied to biology). The section on autopoiesis is also interesting, especially when linked to the two strands of cybernetic evolution—first-order and second-order—in order to examine how biology, at the level of ontology, defines what a body is and turns it into a kind of information machine. This is also where second-order cybernetics becomes more compelling, because the observer—in this case, the body—enters the system and becomes entangled in the feedback struggle.
Even so, my main takeaway is that, much like other theoretical arguments that are more or less inspired by Landian philosophy, the book ultimately offers an extremely vague account of the relationship between the body and Capital. There’s no clear, challenging argument.
October 23, 2025
I have been struggling with the biologist part of me, trying to understand whether, when, and in what I want to do a PhD... Then I stumbled upon MYB's substacks on this and started understanding it might not be just me, maybe biology today, under neoliberal capitalism, is to blame a little too. The book expanded on this, and also offered an alternative, or a thought framework that can be applied to research. Must read for biologists !
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews