The paradoxes of the parasite. The qui perd gagne of the human (revisited)

ABSTRACT

In this article I shall explore the development of Michel Serres’s understanding of the human parasite, starting from The Parasite (1980) and The Natural Contract (1990), through to Hominescence (2001). I shall consider whether the development that I trace marks a progression in the sophistication and complexity of his thought or if, on the contrary, it could be seen as marked in some ways by regressive features. I shall compare Serres’s parasite with Lacanian jouissance: it brings the gift of death and thereby creates life in so far as it is worth living. Ultimately it exemplifies again the paradoxes of the qui perd gagne mechanism: relations construct the ego but in ecstasy the ego is again lost; loss becomes gain; relation precedes being. The recurrent question ‘who am I?’ is answered by Serres in poetic form: I am a multiple mosaic, I am a multiplicity.

RÉSUMÉ

Depuis Le parasite (1980) jusqu’à Hominescence (2001) en passant par Le contrat naturel (1990), Michel Serres ne cesse de développer sa conception de l’homme comme parasite. Ce développement marque-t-il un progrès de sa pensée en termes de sophistication et de complexité, ou faut-il au contraire y déceler des traits régressifs? Telle la jouissance lacanienne, le parasite selon Serres apporte la mort, la donne, tout en créant néanmoins une vie digne d’être vécue. On finira par y reconnaître une nouvelle illustration des paradoxes du mécanisme du qui perd gagne : les relations construisent l’égo qui pourtant se reperd dans l’extase ; la perte se transforme en gain ; la relation précède l’être. À l’éternelle question « qui suis-je? » la réponse de Serres se fait poétique : je suis une mosaïque multiple, je suis une multiplicité.

The parasite is destroying the host. The alien has invaded the host, perhaps to kill the father of the family, in an act which does not look like parricide but is.

May it not be already that uncanny alien which is so close that it cannot be seen as strange, a host in the sense of enemy rather than host in the sense of open-handed dispenser of hospitality? (Miller 1977)

Recently the view on parasites in contemporary biology has drastically changed. Whereas parasites were previously seen as evolutionary degenerates, today parasites are regarded by many biologists as essential forces that shape ecosystems and drive evolution […] What if a state of parasitic dependency is no longer seen as a sign of failure or something to be overcome in favour of autonomy and self-determination but is instead seen as a necessary condition for the production of art? (Von Elburg 2020)

Le parasite prend tout et ne donne rien. (Serres 1980)

‘C’est de la littérature’, qui signifie ‘Vous parlez pour ne rien dire.’ Reste à nous demander quel est ce rien, ce non-savoir silencieux que l’objet littéraire doit communiquer au lecteur? (Sartre 1972)

In this article I shall explore the development of Michel Serres’s understanding of the human parasite, starting from Le parasite (1980) via Le contrat naturel ([1990] 2018) through to Hominescence (2001) and La petite poucette (2012). I shall consider whether the development marks a progression in the sophistication and complexity of his thought or if, on the contrary, it could be seen as marked in some ways by regressive features. Ultimately, perhaps, Serres’s intellectual journey will prove to be characterised more by paradox than dialectics.

First, as so often with ‘Continental’ philosophers, a word of warning on Serres’s unusual style of writing. Like so many twentieth- and twenty first-century French philosophers, Serres frequently hypothesises and speculates and even plays Devil’s advocate without making that procedure explicit. Indeed, his reflections often operate via an initial conditional tense which quickly morphs into a present indicative so that the hypothetical nature of his thinking is not easily apparent, in French or a fortiori in English. So many recent French philosophers operate like this (take Foucault or Derrida, for example) that anglophone readers are necessarily already familiar with the technique, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t still be caught unawares.

And second caveat, my analysis investigates once again the paradoxes of the qui perd gagne mechanism which I have explored many times before in relation in particular to Sartre, Lacan, and Derrida, the last of whom was an exact contemporary of Serres. Serres’s work depends so heavily on the reversals of qui perd gagne that it seemed essential, indeed irresistible, to examine its role in the development of his thinking on the complexities of the parasite and also to make some brief comparisons with its operation in the work of these three philosophers.

Human beings, claims Serres, may be seen as the universal parasite (Serres 1980, 52/24). They take and give ‘nothing’ [rien] in return (52/24, 327/182). What does this mean: in what sense do humans take everything and give nothing in return? Serres’s text starts with the ancient tale of the town rat and the country rat, long-familiar from Aesop, Horace, and La Fontaine, feasting on scraps from the tax collector’s table. Fermier général is given in the English translation as ‘tax farmer’, that is a collector of customs duties, so not a farmer in the usual sense at all, though etymologically related. We can see at once that, on the first and simplest level of parasitism, the country rat is a parasite in the house of the town rat, himself a parasite in the house of the tax collector, himself a parasite in the sense of collecting taxes and giving nothing in return. In Serres’s deceptively decisive terms, parasitism is a one-way street, a ‘flèche simple irréversible, sans retour’, ‘le flux va dans un sens, jamais dans l’autre’ (19/5). But that is in fact not the end of the parasitic story. If we look briefly for comparison at the story recounted in Bong Joon-Ho’s recent film, The Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, the intricacy of the parasitic regress is evident. The poor Koreans of the Kim family, living in their banjiha (semi-basement) in Seoul, are shown as parasitic on the rich family (the Parks) whom they progressively infiltrate and dominate, themselves arguably parasitic on the society in which they live, consuming without producing, as well as—ultimately—on the Kims themselves, who serve their every need. This reverse parasitism has fascinated reviewers and critics of the film who ruminate on the vexed question: who exactly is the Parasite? Michel Serres might have illuminated their reflections by showing the complexity of the issue: ‘L’écornifleur [the scrounger] n’est pas toujours celui qu’on pense. C’est l’invité, c’est l’inviteur, c’est le convive, c’est l’éleveur’ (119/64).

Because Serres is never simple. In the eponymous text of 1980, the parasite is often presented as a positive, liberating, joyous phenomenon. This is the point of the initial epigram from Sartre: ‘quel est ce rien silencieux?’, what is this mysterious ‘nothing’ that the literary work communicates to its reader in a form of non-conceptual knowledge (non-savoir) and that, in a similar reversal, the parasite bestows on those surrounding it? It would doubtless be interesting to consider the work of art itself as parasitic in Serres’s sense, but this is not my purpose in this essay, where I am concerned rather with the human being as parasite. In the text of 1980, it is the parasite who provides the space for change, the parasite who invents (71/35), the parasite who lies at the heart of relation (99/52, 144/79). And for Serres, as we have seen, paradoxically but not uniquely, relation precedes essence and identity (119/64). The parasite may disrupt, but disruption is necessary if repetition and entropy are to be avoided (161/87, 221/122). Contrary to the intuitions of common sense, chance, risk, anxiety and disorder ultimately consolidate a system rather than simply disrupting it (36/14). Noise interrupts the message but it also constitutes the message (122/66, 252/142). Systems work because they don’t work (144/79) to put it at its most brutal. ‘C’est le paradoxe du parasite. […] Le parasite est l’être de la relation. […] Le parasite est être et non-être, relation et non-relation’ (145/79).

The parasite, I would suggest, shares many of the paradoxes of Lacanian jouissance (1966): it brings the gift of death (19/5) and thereby creates life in so far as life is worth living (242/134, 259/146, 395/220). Jouissance interrupts pleasure, but pleasure is deathly in the wrong sense: pleasure binds us and blinds us to life and distracts us from our radical finitude. Jouissance is dangerous and it is what makes us fully human, ready to die as well as to live.¹ The parasite enables creation ex nihilo. It does not give back ‘nothing’ in any simple sense of nothing, it excites, it intervenes, it introduces an element of chance into the tidy equation. It allows us to choose the unknown and the dangers of change over entropy and sclerosis (350/195). In Derrida’s (1972) terms, it is a pharmakon, poison as cure (347/193, 363/203). The parasite is like the grasshopper of Aesop’s fable: it sings all summer long and in the winter asks for help and food from those who deferred desire and worked in the fields (153/83).

There have been multiple retellings of this fable, many of which predictably glorify hard work and rebuke idleness, but there is an alternative stream which celebrates the joy brought by apparently unproductive activity. One of the most delightful of these is Frederick (1967), a beautifully illustrated children’s book by Leo Lionni, which tells the story of Frederick, the field-mouse who whiled away the summer days, dreaming and dancing, contributing nothing, surviving from the gifts of food from the other mice, until winter sets in in earnest and the food runs out. Then, contrary perhaps to our mundane and moralistic expectations, Frederick really comes into his own, for he has tales to tell, wonderful stories invoking all the colours and poetry of the summer days, so that the mice can wait out the winter, sustained in spirit if not in body. Frederick, surely, is the prototypical human parasite, creating ‘nothing’ but art and poetry. ‘Le parasite mange, mais il amuse l’hôte, en retour’ (198/109).

Serres’s preferred terms for the human parasite are radical and eccentric—it is the wildcard, the madman, and the actor: ‘le joker, le fou et le comédien’ (371/207). It is the subject (388/216), with nothing at its heart but nihilation, to use Sartre’s terminology. But Serres is far more playful than Sartre—he can afford to be, perhaps, since he is writing forty years later, and after not only Sartre’s dismantling of the subject conceived as self in the thirties and forties in La transcendance de l’ego (1936) and L’Etre et le néant (1943) but also that of Derrida and Lacan amongst others from the 1960s onwards. So Serres does not need to spell out the deconstruction of the subject in any rigorous or laborious fashion. He can use the image of the parasite and build on all the philosophical work that has gone before. He can also permit himself a far more literary and poetic style of writing and argumentation. He uses the games of tag or ‘catch’ and ballgames like rugby to explain his theory of the quasi-object and the quasi-subject: the person with the ball is ‘it’, he or she is the victim, made so precisely by holding the ball. At other moments, someone else is the victim, when they, in turn, are holding the ball. The point, put simply, is that we are constituted as subjects and objects by others, by our position in the game or in the team. Relation precedes identity. The victim is ‘it’ only because of their position at that moment in the game. The idea of the ball as quasi-object and quasi-subject will work better as an explanatory image for some readers than for others, which is arguably one of the problems encountered by philosophy when it leaves traditional conceptualisation aside and turns to metaphor and exemplification. But when Serres evokes his understanding of subjectivity more lyrically and, perhaps, more ‘philosophically’, we may better appreciate his unique contribution to the theory of the subject:

Ce pourquoi la victime apaise la crise est ce savoir impregnable que nous portons tous, sous la voix qui dit je, que cette victime peut être je tout aussi bien, et au hasard. Le ballon est ce quasi-objet, quasi-sujet par qui je suis sujet, c’est-à-dire soumis. Tombé, mis dessous, piétiné, plaqué, jeté de haut en bas, assujetti, exposé, puis substitué, tout à coup, par cette vicariance. La liste est celle des sens de subjicere, subjectus. La philosophie n’est pas toujours aux lieux d’ordinaire prévus. J’apprends plus au sujet du sujet en jouant à la balle que dans le poêle cartésien. Où pourtant rôdait quelque mise à mort. (406/227)

Vicariance is a strange word. In biology it can be the temporary host for a parasite. Here it seems rather to have the meaning of substitution, and ‘vicar’ to have the meaning of replacement for the priest.

Serres’s text continues:

Ce quasi-objet marqueur de sujet, comme on dit marquer un agneau pour l’autel ou pour la boucherie, est un étonnant constructeur d’intersubjectivité. Par lui, nous savons comment et quand nous sommes des sujets, quand et comment nous ne le sommes plus. Nous, qu’est-ce à dire? Nous sommes en précision ce clignotement fluctuant du je. Le je est dans le jeu un jeton qu’on échange. (406/227)

In both passages the English translation omits a strange and intriguing allusion to potential death: the somewhat bewildering Cartesian ‘mise à mort’ as well as the notion of marking a lamb for the slaughter. Serres seems to have death on his mind almost continuously, but Lawrence Schehr, the translator, has preferred to elide this somewhat mysterious preoccupation.

In Le parasite, then, Serres’s understanding of the role of the human parasite is for the most part provocatively positive, though it is occasionally undercut by the references to our mortality. The parasite is the marker of freedom, invention, change, jouissance. Similarly, Serres’s understanding of the ‘we’ is equally unusual: the ‘we’ is not community or solidarity. One might initially think, he suggests, that ‘Le nous se fait par les passes du je. Par échange du je […] Chacun porte sa pierre et le mur s’élève. Chacun porte son je et le nous se construit’ (407/227). But such a conception is naïve and facile:

Cette addition est imbécile et ressemble à un discours ministériel. Non. […] Le nous n’est pas une somme de je, mais une nouveauté produite par légations du je, par concessions, désistements, résignations du je. […] Il apparaît brutalement dans l’ivresse et l’extase, anéantissements du principe d’individuation. […] Elle montre que nous sommes capables d’extase, d’écart à notre équilibre, que nous pouvons placer notre centre hors de nous. (407–8/228)

Or, as Serres expresses it elsewhere, there is no reason why the ‘we’ should be constituted by a collection of singular, rational, and almost disembodied ‘I’s. ‘Qui assure que le nous a les mêmes attributs, les mêmes facultés que le je? Une pensée, une intelligence, une volonté. Pourquoi pas des désirs, des appétits ou une sexualité?’ (224/124).

In Cary Wolfe’s Introduction to the English translation (‘Bring the Noise: The Parasite and the multiple genealogies of posthumanism’) he confidently assimilates Serres to posthumanism, though not in any simple sense of coming after humanism: in Wolfe’s view

Serres’s work asserts that we have never been human, if by ‘human’ we mean […] ‘the free agent, the citizen builder of the Leviathan, the distressing visage of the human person, the other of a relationship, consciousness, the cogito, the hermeneut, the inner self, the thee and thou of dialogue, presence to oneself, intersubjectivity’. (p. xi)

I am not sure that it is intellectually entirely respectable to argue that Serres asserts we have never been human and then give a very out-dated, if humorous, definition of what this might mean. The list quoted is from Bruno Latour’s interviews with Serres in 1990 (Serres 1992). For Serres, Wolfe argues, ‘the post-human precedes and subtends the human, both ontologically and epistemologically’ (vii). We will return to this question at the end of this chapter in connection with Serres’s Hominescence of 2001. But for now it must suffice to say that Serres takes the human extremely seriously and that it would be better to argue that the human subsumes the posthuman rather than being opposed to it.

Serres’s text ends with a final chapter on love, ‘De l’amour’, a relation between two of course, but beyond that the section is increasingly confusing and complex. Serres is keen to point out that his notion of substitution should not be confused with interchangeability, for this, of course, would be the end of human relations as we know and value them:

Or l’attribut du parasite, jusqu’à maintenant passé sous silence, est sa spécificité.

N’importe quoi ne trouble pas un message qui passe. N’importe qui n’est pas invité à la table de n’importe qui. […]

Comment se fait-il que je t’aime, toi justement parmi cent mille, moi justement, ça tombe si bien! Est-ce une illusion, le chiffrage à la dom Juan est-il une loi plus sage? (412/230)

We might have hoped for and even expected some kind of final section which explored further the contribution of the human parasite to everything that goes beyond the material. Perhaps it is indeed there, but I could not find it. What we do find, however, is a repeated yearning for the referent, be it bread, wine or tenderness: it seems at the end that words may not be enough. Socrates is described as ironic, philosophy as hard-hearted, ‘philosophie parlière’ (439/244). We may be reminded again of Sartre’s ‘Vous parlez pour ne rien dire’. Serres laments what he sees as the apparent loss of the world in contemporary thought:

Pas de référent, pas de chose, pas de pain pour Pénia, pas de chère pour les invités, pas d’amour pour les amoureux. Des mots pour vous endormir, du vin pour vous endormir, des mots et du vin pour endormir le tragique et le comique de l’existence. Pas de pain pour les pauvres, pas d’amour pour les hommes, pas de vin pour les fêtes, rien, toujours rien, du vent, rien que du vent […], des mots rien que des mots. […] Vieille philosophie, nouvelle cuisine […] je boute ce discours par la fenêtre ouverte. (439/244–5)

In this sense Le parasite ends on a more pessimistic note than we might have anticipated. More pessimistic than Serres himself expected too, perhaps?

Voici le Diable, donc; non, non, je ne l’attendais pas. Lui venu, ce livre s’achève, comme brûlé. Je ne savais pas qu’il était, irrémédiablement, un livre du Mal. […] Du mal méchant, tout simplement. (454/253)

In one sense this seems a further—or final—twist of the tourniquet, leaving us on a darker tone than we may have predicted, certainly darker than the depiction of the human parasite as it has been presented up till now. Of course, the sudden appearance of the Devil as an (anti) Deus ex machina can also be read as part of an ironic and blackly comic moment of drama; but irony cannot ever entirely destroy its subject and often reflects a writer’s desire (or need) to have his cake and eat it, in other words to keep his options open. Serres proffers the Devil to his readers in an unsettling move which refuses ultimately to take sides. And on another level, this concluding uncertainty and undercutting of the creative power of the parasite is a rhetorical device helpful to the structure of my article for it leads on, to some extent against my will and better judgement, to the far bleaker landscape of Le contrat naturel where the human parasite seems arguably more catastrophic than liberating.

Ten years later, then, in Le contrat naturel of 1990, Serres’s discussion of the parasite has changed considerably. His stress is no longer on the complex and sophisticated role of the parasite in revivifying and transforming the world but rather on the simpler model of the parasite taking everything and giving nothing in return: ‘Le parasite prend tout et ne donne rien; l’hôte donne tout et ne prend rien’ (88/36); not, it would seem, now, a mysterious and productive ‘nothing’ but rather a deadly and non-reciprocal greed. The problem lies in part in the qui perd gagne mechanism, or, in this case, its reversal as qui gagne perd. The human parasite has been too successful for its own good: its exploitation of Nature, its host, has resulted in such a powerful depletion of the resources of the natural world that it looks set to lead directly to its own annihilation:

Or à force de la maîtriser, nous sommes devenus tant et si peu maîtres de la Terre, qu’elle menace de nous maîtriser de nouveau à son tour. […] Plus encore que nous la possédons, elle va nous posséder. […] Pourquoi faut-il, désormais, chercher à maîtriser notre maîtrise? Parce que, non réglée, excédant son but, contre-productive, la maîtrise pure se retourne contre soi. Ainsi, les anciens parasites, mis en danger de mort par les excès commis sur leurs hôtes, qui, morts, ne les nourissent plus ni ne les logent, deviennent obligatoirement des symbiotes. […] En raison de ces interactions croisées, la maîtrise ne dure qu’un court terme et se tourne en servitude. […] Voici la bifurcation de l’histoire: ou la mort ou la symbiose. (80–1/33–4)

This, of course, is the core of Serres’s text. I will not rehearse it any further. In short, the message in 1990 is that the parasite is always exploitative, ‘toujours abusif, le parasite’ (85/36). What has happened to Frederick, the troubadour, whose songs and stories kept his fellow mice amused during the hardships of the winter months? Why has Serres apparently turned his heart against the imaginative and inventive parasitic guest? One answer must surely be that during the decade of the 1980s science has become increasingly convinced that human despoliation of the planet is reaching its limit and must be curbed. Serres’s explicit mission in Le contrat naturel was, of course, to try to convince nations to grant some kind of legal status to the natural world to protect it from its human predators. So the polemical nature of the text obviously militates against too much complexity and subtlety. But this is not the whole picture; the very internal logic of the parasite means not only that the winner loses (we despoil the world we live in) but also that the loser wins. What would this imply for the human parasite?

Some clues may perhaps be read between the lines of Serres’s polemic. In the final section of the book, ‘Cordes, Dénouement’, Serres considers the issue of ‘hominization’ (196/101). What does it mean to become man? Serres, along with many others worldwide, was watching the launch of the Ariane rocket in October 1989 as it took off from Earth, an extraordinary and moving moment, a man-made spacecraft apparently leaving man behind, reducing its spectators to the kind of awe and wonder that Serres believes characterised primitive humankind. Our extreme technical sophistication paradoxically brings to the fore our most archaic responses. As we ‘become human’ we may relinquish one set of primitive ties, but only to see another set resurface. And we see death itself reappear at this point, never far away however much we may wish to forget it. Once again the apparent negation implied by mortality is revealed as essential to our being human: death is now described as creating precisely the kind of paradoxical renewal that the parasite was credited with in Serres’s earlier text: ‘La mort vivifie la vie, qui meurt de manquer d’elle’ (216/114). The qui perd gagne mechanism would seem to have come full circle. The subject is no longer you or I, it is the cord, the rope that binds us, the love between us (199/103). Serres claims to have felt fully alive in Palo Alto during the Lomo Prieta earthquake of 1989. He says he ‘tasted joy’ because the walls that keep us apart from each other and from nature were suddenly torn asunder: ‘la mince pellicule technique se déchire en crissant et claquant de manière métallique ou crystalline, le monde, enfin, vient à moi, me ressemble, tout désemparé’ (232/124). ‘Who am I?’ Serres asks: ‘A tremor of nothingness’, experiencing ecstasy, albeit at a moment when dozens were dying:

Une trémulation de néant, vivant dans un séisme permanent. Or, pendant un moment de bonheur profond, à mon corps vacillant vient s’unir la Terre spasmodique. […] Communiant tous deux, en amour elle et moi, doublement désemparés, ensemble palpitant, réunis dans une aura. (232/124)

As Auden famously said at an even more death-dealing moment, at the outbreak of World War II, ‘We must love one another or die’:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

(‘1 September 1939’, Auden 1940)

Hominisation, then, is always a paradoxical, or arguably dialectical if you prefer, movement between negation and affirmation. If the human parasite seems to be beleaguered in Serres’s Contrat naturel, it is not, none the less, abandoned and it comes into its own, once again, at the end of the text when Serres allows his natural poetic impulses to come to the fore. I am a tremor of nothingness, united with the Earth in a moment of profound happiness. The qui perd gagne mechanism returns as the text concludes, and the far more pessimistic qui gagne perd is allowed to fade into the background. The reversal encountered at the end of Le parasite is in turn itself reversed.

Hominescence of 2001 takes Serres’s exploration of the development of the human several stages further. The title is chosen, he explains, to differentiate the changes that Serres wants to consider from the more major and well-established stages of ‘hominization’ described by Leroi-Gourhan amongst others (232/183). Hominescence refers to the relatively minor changes of the last fifty or so years—not the dramatic and familiar earlier evolutionary stages of standing upright or using opposed thumbs but rather the more recent and apparently small-scale changes entailed by our responses to progress in medical science and to technological advances such as computers, smartphones, and instant messaging. How do these developments affect what it means to be human? It is instructive to see Serres, then already in his seventies, embrace these changes and refuse to demonise their young and their addiction to their devices (339/266). And this acceptance and indeed celebration of human evolution as it is transformed by technology are the subject matter of his short and disarming text, Petite Poucette, of 2012.

But, for our purposes, the main interest of this text lies elsewhere. Again it starts with death: death and finitude construct our lives (1/1). Qui perd gagne is once more foregrounded, as is the pharmakon: to take a couple of early medical examples, it is apoptosis, or the death of cells, which not only contributes to our decline and mortality but also protects us from the cell-proliferation that is cancer (5/4). Or again, it is oxygen which allows us to live and breathe, but oxygen can also break down our cells and damage our DNA (6/5). ‘Grâce à l’oxygène je respire et sa rouille me détruit. Ce qui me tue me conforte’ (6/5). And Serres is not bending facts to fit his thesis, these paradoxes are well-known among scientists.

Oxygen is killing us. While its role as the breath of life is well known, the destructive nature of oxygen is more clandestine, slowly chipping away at our health until symptoms emerge.

Oxygen can break down the very cells that make up our tissues and organs, our bones and blood. It can damage DNA and critical enzymes. It can injure and stiffen our cell membranes, making the movement of nutrients in and out of cells more challenging while ruining our receptors for various hormones including testosterone, insulin, and thyroid. (Anonymous 2018)

What Hominescence most importantly allows Serres to explore is the way humans are self-creating: freedom incarnate, to use his rather beautiful image: ‘la liberté […] s’incarne dans le corps entier’ (28/22). Like Sloterdijk in You Must Change Your Life (2013), Serres believes that training and practice is what enables self-development and change. Indeed, training enables invention, what he calls new deviations, ‘de nouveaux écarts’ (45/35) as we construct ourselves. Like Sartre and others before him, Serres stresses the indetermination of humanity, ‘nous n’existons ni comme étants ni comme êtres, mais comme des modes […] nous ne sommes même pas’ (64–5/49), he argues. What is initially perhaps more puzzling is his claim that in the modern world we are losing much of our finitude (67/51). But Serres celebrates this loss as well, qui perd gagne indeed (232/183):

Pénétrant à petits pas dans le global, nous quittons nos anciennes maisons, le corps faible, les outils locaux, le monde borné, nous perdons le confort d’habitats exigües et de leur porte étroite. Tragique parfois, la finitude permit cependant de beaux gestes théâtraux à bien des philosophes, héros en chambre de l’absurde. Voilà qu’il leur faut déchanter. […] L’absence de l’être, d’un projet défini, d’une définition de l’homme témoignent de notre commençante infinitude.

Les lamentations prophétiques selon lesquelles nous allons perdre notre âme dans les laboratoires de biochimie ou devant les ordinateurs s’accordent sur cette haute note: Que nous fûmes heureux dans notre petite cabane! […] Jamais la croissance de nos moyens ne s’accompagna d’un tel concert de regrets […] L’extrême difficulté à se délivrer de ce petit oeuf de finitude—que je sache, il nous en reste assez—explique et excuse le contresens. Homo universalis commence de vivre au grand air de cette relative infinitude. (67/51–2)

As we create ourselves as human we increasingly distinguish ourselves from the animals which we still remain, and towards which Serres claims to feel an extreme ambivalence of love and loathing (131/102), loathing most of all of pets and other domesticated animals. We are born as an object from the womb, become a virtual subject through our mother’s tenderness (and here Serres seems to echo Julia Kristeva on maternal reliance (2013)), and ultimately an actual subject through our lover’s words (Serres 128/100). How are we liberated from the animals we were and are? ‘Animal timide, à peine guéri de la bête, désintoxiqué, désenchaîné, je reste, quoique sauvé par la déviation, un animal, encore’ (133/104). The ‘déviation’ is from matter, and the means of our liberation is love. I can become mere animal again if I lose my self: ‘ce que les philosophes appellent avec arrogance et angoisse ou, peut-être, méprise, le “moi”’ (133/104). I long for freedom from ties but am simultaneously terrified of the metamorphosis and explosiveness it involves. A spectrum of multiplicity and decentring has been opened up to humankind (156/120), leading to a potential new humanism of mosaic and diversity. But the destruction of boundaries is also experienced as loss, finitude holds us safe, and openness offers terror as well as potential (162/125). We may be overwhelmed by fear of our unknown future, not realising that fear is the necessary reverse side of value: ‘que cela même qui vaut la peine de vivre vaut justement le sacrifice de la vie et que des existences à risque zero n’ont, du coup, pas de valeur’ (164/126). We are not, we exist, and all our choices make us what we become (169/130).

It would be hard to avoid sensing echoes of Sartre in some of Serres’s most existential pronouncements, just as earlier we recognised echoes of Lacan and Derrida. The familiar academic conventions of acknowledgement of sources, footnotes and references do not seem to have been followed by this most learned and cultivated of thinkers. This is not of course to deny that Serres is a highly original thinker, but his rejection of footnotes paradoxically works to mask this: what Serres does with ideas of the decentred or non-self-identical subject is to produce a lyrical and powerful evocation of notions that can sometimes seem dry in the words of other philosophers. The emotional implications of our existential situation are expressed in a poetic mode more familiar in literature than in philosophy. Serres is an innovative thinker, but he is also an unacknowledged synthesiser and even a magpie, so that the ideas of other philosophers run through his works and are part of the woof and warp of his texts. Acknowledged, they would not perhaps be so noticeable.

To sum up then, painfully briefly, and without Serres’s lyricism, a little of what Hominescence shows us about the human subject: existence depends on relation and precedes identity (192/149); language constructs me, as does love (202/160). The human role as parasite introduces a third into every relation (209/165), and forges and forces new paths for the human. We are leaving the human behind, but only in the sense of creating and inventing a new form of human and humanism:

Quittons-nous l’homme pour autant? Oui et non, car tous ces événements marquent un moment décisif de l’hominisation. Nous ne serons plus des hommes comme nous le fûmes, nous devenons des hommes comme nos enfants l’entendront. En attendant, nous voilà autonomes, notre proper roi, notre proper droit; libre, peut-être, dans le temps et l’espace global par lesquels nous errons, de donner un jour à la mort notre adresse. (248/196)

Ce nouveau coup d’hominescence m’obligera demain à redéfinir un humanisme. (272/215. See also 332/261)

Hominescence, I would argue, confirms our earlier resistence to Cary Wolfe’s somewhat hasty identification of Serres with post-humanism, though, of course, Wolfe did not have this later work to test his ideas against.

The final chapters of the text revel once more in the possibilities for reversal and paradox offered by the qui perd gagne mechanism: relations construct the ego, but in ecstasy the ego is again lost; loss becomes gain; relation precedes existence; relation precedes being (286/227). Who am I? is the recurrent question asked by the text. I am a multiple mosaic (339/266), I am a multiplicity.

Qui suis-je, sinon une émergence dont le bruit s’élève au-dessus d’une arche noire et tacite, dont une rumeur soutenue se soulève sur ce bruit de fond, dont quelque musique, rythme et chant, jaillit de cette rumeur, dont le premier balbutiement se lève sur cette musique? Qui suis-je sinon ce château de cartes? (285/228)

In the words of Walt Whitman (1855) and more recently of Bob Dylan (2020), I contain multitudes. For Serres, like the poets, this was not simply a theory but a joyfully tumultuous way of seeing and living in and with the world: Serres’s work on the parasite can best be read as a philosophical and poetic celebration of the inescapable qui perd gagne of human finitude, non-self-identity, and mortality.

This collection on Serres arose, as we say in our Introduction, from the 2022 International Philosophical Seminar in the Dolomites organised by Gary Aylesworth and Serge Trottein. Perhaps I might take this opportunity to thank them once again for their inspired choice of philosopher. I have come to love Michel Serres. I wish I had known him. I relish his evocative, poetic, non-argumentative and often convoluted style. I cannot be sure how much is entirely new, but nor do I know what this would mean. I hope you will forgive the possible self-indulgence of my concluding words. They are heartfelt. My further excuse is that they are not mine but Serres’s own, from ‘Le travail’ in Le parasite:

Mon dernier détour de regard est fini. Jamais plus, jamais plus je ne pourrais dire merci. Jamais je ne dirais assez merci. Merci pour les hasards, merci pour ce miracle, pour la mer turbulente et l’horizon flou, merci pour les nuages, pour le fleuve et le feu, merci pour la chaleur, la ferveur et les flammes, merci pour les vents et les sons, pour la plume et pour le violon, merci pour ce repas immense de langage, merci d’amour et de souffrance, pour la douleur et la féminité […] non, je n’ai pas fini, je commence […].

Je suis l’éclat, le bruit, le vent. Aveugle, ébloui, assourdi. Je commençais à peine, en larmes, à dire le merci, l’équivalent de grâce.

Je vous en prie, souffle le bruit, le vent, le son, qui résonne derrière la porte. Je vous prie et je vous invite, soyez le bienvenu. (167/90)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, Lacan (1967).