Search Results for serre

... With the universal human under suspicion in modern philosophy and in anthropology, where do we stand in the Anthropocene that seems to place the human back at the center of things? Serres uses the marine world to construct his understandings of “human” and “world.” This chapter uses Serres...

... This chapter asks what might happen if Serres’s writing is considered not as “theory” but rather as an instance of the genre of “wisdom literature.” From that angle, Serres’s writing offers up a sometimes uncomfortable mirror to anthropologists. Conversely, a foray into some recent attempts...

... The introduction argues for the advancement of anthropological theory through engagement with the work of Michel Serres. Particularly striking is the potentiality of porosity as a conceptual pivot to explore both Serres and ethnographic subjects. Touring Serres’s key works on time, religion...

... The connection between the works of Michel Serres and Gregory Bateson is provided by their joint interest in the nature of Nature. Reading Serres and Bateson together is thus not an academic exercise but contribution to a genuine intellectual dialogue that can help reconstruct thinking after...

... This chapter introduces Michel Serres as an important theorist of modern warfare and violence. It brings together Serres’s topological perspectives on time, history, and general ecology of pollution. The chapter thus opens new avenues for thinking and writing about the long-lasting socio...

... How have the practice and “idea” of safety changed as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic? In this chapter, Serres’s work on the foundation and marking out of social relations is used to analyze the shifting porous boundaries between the “soft” semiotic and “hard” social distancing aspects...

... to differentiate between lives lived as the object of colonial racism and those lived as its beneficiaries. This chapter reflects on how one might understand the social and political stakes of Serres’s attempt to find a universal ground for the variations of the body by putting Serres’s writings in conversation...

...Knowledge Quests This chapter considers the figure of the angel as found in Serres’s Angels: A Modern Myth and in the thought and practice of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Its aim is not to theorize Ethiopia through the philosophy of Serres but to explore a matter of shared concern...

...Of Parasites and Contracts This chapter lays out a path for imagining an anthropology of the natural contract. It does so by staging a conversation between Michel Serres’s writings on parasites and symbiotic ontologies and anthropological theories of exchange and by exploring the complex...

... a porous borderland between contiguous nation states or states of consciousness where openness to the ineffable and indeterminate may prove edifying and regenerative. Michel Serres’s work exemplifies creative boundary-crossing as a way of both enhancing life and revitalizing thought. This chapter revisits...

... To Serres, the relationship between the singular and the universal is not stable. While a globalizing concept may reflect totalizing tendencies, Serres indicates that its realization may amount to a congenitally failing operation. This chapter explores the relationship between (global) form...

... This chapter considers the figure of the angel as found in Serres’s Angels: A Modern Myth and in the thought and practice of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Its aim is not to theorize Ethiopia through the philosophy of Serres but to explore a matter of shared concern between them: asking how...

... The afterword takes the form of a conversation with Jane Bennett. It explores the methods and connections in Michel Serres’s work in relation to the production of knowledge about humans, nature, and the planet. It concludes that Serres might help start conceiving an anthropology that does...

... This chapter lays out a path for imagining an anthropology of the natural contract. It does so by staging a conversation between Michel Serres’s writings on parasites and symbiotic ontologies and anthropological theories of exchange and by exploring the complex entrapments between the nature...

... lives lived as the object of colonial racism and those lived as its beneficiaries. This chapter reflects on how one might understand the social and political stakes of Serres’s attempt to find a universal ground for the variations of the body by putting Serres’s writings in conversation with those...

... traditions of the Balga tribes against familiar Maussian ideas and the models of parasitism suggested by Michel Serres, this chapter argues that hospitality, as Bedouin know it, is constructed in ways that resist the romanticism that besets anthropological portraits of “pre-capitalist” and “premodern” gift...

...Preface The preface outlines how the book came into being. It frames the anthropological value of engaging with Michel Serres and offers the reader sets of potential conversations to navigate the book. conversation porosity networks ...

... disciplinary functions. Thus, the chapter proposes that Serres be read in conversation with Sigmund Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences” to offer alternate angles on the same problem—how much connection is desirable, and where does categorization become an inevitable tool of governance for sorting...