This third kind of life, the”nameless thing” so often described by Lovecraft, is a paradigm for the concept of life today. The concept of life encompasses so much, from the most reductive biological viewpoint to the most open-ended ethical or existential viewpoint. When definitions or criteria for life are given, even these are subject to modification and revision. There is a sense in which the major problem concerning life has to do not with its definition, and whether such a definition is possible, but with the very plasticity of life, a shape-shifting quality exhibited in all the different ways in which we use the concept to correlate to the different phenomena that are deemed to be living–the plasticity of all the different ways in which life is thought and shaped, all the myriad ways in which life reflects upon itself and shapes itself, all the forms of existence, resistance, and insistence that life it.

Eugene Thacker, After Life p.4