“…no one has carried my genetic code, or yours, reader, whereas there have been many Michel Serres in the past; there are today, and there will be in the future as many as there are apartments or houses to rent…” Malfeasance p88

Serres…

a story of a long distence love affair and free phone calls made me think of this… serres angels

What we have left of all this history presents nothing but two languages as such, narratives or legends and proofs or figures, words and formulas. Thus it is as if we were confronted by two parallel lines which, as is well known, never meet. The origin constantly recedes, inaccessible, irretrievable. The problem is open.

I have tried to resolve this question three times. First, by immersing it in the technology of communications. When two speakers have a dialogue or a dispute, the channel that connects them must be drawn by a diagram with four poles, a complete square equipped with its two diagonals. However loud or irreconcilable their quarrel, however calm or tranquil their agreement, they are linked, in fact, twice: they need, first of all, a certain intersection of their repertoires, without which they would remain strangers; they then band together against the noise which blocks the communication channel. These two conditions are necessary to the diaIogue, though not sufficient. Consequently, the two speakers have a common interest in excluding a third man and including a fourth, both of whom are prosopopoeias of the,powers of noise or of the instance of intersection.(1) <#1>Now this schema functions in exactly this manner in Plato’s /Dialogues/, as can easily be shown, through the play of people and their naming, /their resemblances and differences/, their mimetic preoccupations and the dynamics of their violence. Now then, and above all, the mathematical sites, from the /Meno /through the /Timaeus/, by way of the /Statesman /and others, are all reducible geometrically to this diagram. Whence the origin appears, we pass from one language to another, the language said to be natural presupposes a dialectical schema, and this schema, drawn or written in the sand, as such, is the first of the geometric idealities. Mathematics presents itself as a successful dialogue or a communication which rigorously dominates its repertoire and is maximally purged of noise. Of course, it is not that simple. The irrational and the unspeakable lie in the details; listening always requires collating; there is always a leftover or a residue, indefinitely. But then, the schema remains open, and history possible. The philosophy of Plato, in its presentation and its models, is therefore inaugural, or better yet, it seizes the inaugural moment.

There we see , drawn on the plane of configuration, an infinite sheaf of parallels or lines, along which points spread out one ahead of the other. There we see atoms fall. Or move with equal speed. From top to bottom, if you will, or in any direction you like its not important… Lucretian physics speaks in both way, as far as i can see without contradiction. Globally no one can imagine a top or bottom to the universe. Locally for a mechanical model, which has points of reference in relation to which movement is described, direction is defined. It is in general unimportant. The explicit  thesis of the plurality of worlds gives added coherence to this distinction between the global, the local, the whole, the part…. [The Birth of Physics]

Micehel Serres Birth of Physics… I am myself deviation, and my soul declines, my global body is open, adrift. It slips, irreversibly on the slope. Who am I ? A vortex. A dispersal that comes undone. Yes a a singularity, singular.

In dominating the planet, we become responsible for it. In manipulating death, life, reproduction, the normal and the pathological, we become responsible for them. We are going to have to decide about every thing, and even about Everything - about the physical and thermodynamic future, about Darwinian evolution, about life, about the Earth and about time, filtering possibilities - candidates to be evaluated for becoming realities - a process Leibnitz described as characterizing the wok of God the creator, in the secret of his infinite understanding. #Serres (1990)

That’s about it really in a small dangerous paragraph. Shortly after this was initially published Climate Change finally appeared on the agenda. The mass extinction event became properly understood. The human genome was sequenced and a small but significant number of diseases began to vanish into laboratories. Of course he’s an optimist, on the other hand I decided I might as well be an optimist because the alternative to something like the above is wholesale human extinction, the odds for which are still 50/50 I’ve been told.

The Natural Contract denounced the Cartesian order as the aggressive and leonine act of appropriation; we should no longer be the masters and possessors of nature. The new contract  becomes a rental agreement. Once we have become mere renters we will be able to contemplate peace - peace among humans because peace with the world. #Serres

This overly western concept, western precisely because of the localism of the concept of ‘contract’ does appeal as a near-universalism, but still works better as a non-universal that appeals to a reconfiguration of the notion of property. Here then is a new economism, an appeal against the notions of property than both capitalism and non-capitalist political-economic systems maintain. From ownership to rental and lease… A notion of life-cycle clear haunts this concept, an object is not property but is rather rented until it is to be disposed of within its lifecycle…

I often speak of #Dumezil and three functions of indo-european soverignty, my approach and co-option tending towards my own longer terms philosophical origins in Deleuze and Guattari. But here lets read a quote from #Serres latest use… which is becoming as much mine and co-opted in the same way I use the toolset of Deleuze and Guattari…

“… I too will now meditate on Dumezil’s three stages and their ending. The enlightenment tried to liberate us from Jupiter, from the grip of the divine. Was it successful ? After the second world conflict, a few talented and well-intentioned men in turn invented a Europe without borders, trying to liberate their nations from the stranglehold of Mars, that is, the mortal horrors of war. Will they succeed ? Will we now have to free ourselves from the confrontations unleashed by Quirinus, I Mean by production, work, depletion of resources, trade, the economy and volatile circulation of goods and signs ? Which new enlightenment will liberate humanity from those three false gods ?… “ #Serres - (2011) Malfeasance

This it seems to me is another way of escaping from the indo-european myths which are driving us to a planet of slums…