Mammals in Space, Continued

Levi Bryant puts a rabbit in a vacuum in his terrific new essay:

if a sadistic mad scientist places a fuzzy friendly rabbit in a vacuum sealed box, that rabbit will die, thereby indicating the internality of relations. Insofar as the rabbit can only live in and through its relations to the earth, the argument runs, relations must ontologically be internal. Yet this conflates distinct issues. The rabbit clearly changes (significantly and unfortunately) when it is placed in the vacuum. Yet does the rabbit cease to exist? No. The rabbit loses a quality or set of qualities (being alive) yet still exists. What is conflated here are the qualities of the rabbit and the rabbit in its existence. The rabbit, of course, can be destroyed as in those instances where it is torn to pieces or explodes. And these qualities or phases through which the rabbit passes will, in many respects, be a function of the external relations into which the rabbit enters. Yet these qualitative changes are distinct from the existence of the rabbit as a rabbit. If we hold that being is difference and thereby affirm the existence of individual substances, then the externality of relations necessarily follows as a consequence.