Swarms of comparison: Pests at the ends of the world

Abstract

This article meditates on comparison beyond being a method, an academic technique, or a discursive strategy, and instead as a phenomenon entangled with the apocalyptic. As its critical point of departure, the article considers the concept of “demonio de las comparaciones” described by the Filipino polymath and patriot José Rizal in his novel Noli me tángere (1887), through its particular interpretation by Benedict Anderson. The latter scholar, having soon realized his own mistranslation of Rizal’s concept by transfiguring the most material to be merely spectral, eventually proposed Rizal’s demon to be more akin to pests instead. While Anderson simply explained his suggestion through describing comparison as similarly “buzz[ing] and buzz[ing], and refus[ing] to go away or to be quiet,” this article further explores the implications of pests in thinking through comparison especially in light of the present challenge of the nonhuman, or the urgent call for reconsideration of human agency among a larger network of other forms of agency. To do so, the article then reads a chapter from the contemporary Filipino novel Ang Banal na Aklat ng mga Kumag (The Holy Book of Vermin, 2013) by Allan Derain, which narrates how comparisons unfold among rival swarms of flies in light of looming threat. Ultimately, the article intuits comparison as an inevitable phenomenon that especially emerges from, as much as it responds to, an end of the world.