Sea stars are marine invertebrates belonging to the class Asteroidea, so named by the French zoologist de Blainville in 1830. Asteroidea originates from the Greek aster (star) and eidos (likeness, appearance). They are comprised of a central disk with five arms, featuring tube feet operating on a hydraulic system.

Certain species contain the ability to regenerate a severed arm. At times, an entirely new (differently sexed) sea star can grow from the offshoot. It is both phantom (loss) and limb (wound). Regrowth can take months, and, during that period, the echinoderm is particularly vulnerable.

All energy is directed toward the site of healing. Adriana Cavarero insists that vulnerability contains two poles: wounding and caring. In the condition of being exposed, “the singular body is irremediably open to both responses”(i). Open to threat, vulnerability makes possible growth.

So the body lives and, through dismemberment, becomes itself again and an/other.

We do not contain the same capacity for regeneration. Nor can we understand ourselves as ever having been so unproblematically, ontologically, whole. What is a body, except a series of exclusions? I am not, or no longer, ( ).

Once severed, we no longer experience that limb as part of or belonging to us. Still, some 60-80% of people continue to experience sensations in their lost appendages. Notably, pain. And what about immaterial losses? Those recorded within the body, as opposed to the body-surface? They haunt us too.

José Esteban Muñoz describes this lingering as residue (ii). Our losses may not crawl across the sea floor and into a new future, but they do remain -- as a trace. Ephemeral traces are here and not here, containing a materiality that challenges an ordinary understanding of presence.

Sea stars are ancient. Fossil records of their existence date back 450 million years, though they are hard to locate. After death, sea stars disintegrate, leaving behind only ossicles, spine, and an indelible impact on the environment around them. Only residue.

i. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism. Columbia UP, 2009, p.20.
ii. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, NYU, 2009, p. 71.

- Image by Sophie Sabet, text by Dunja Kovačević

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