Energy and Epiphany in the Later Works of Michel Serres
The Epiphany of the Magi
Near the beginning of Religion, Michel Serres re-narrates the story of the Epiphany—the journey of the magi following the star Bethlehem to witness the birth of the messiah.
Together, they represent the summation of the Axial Age in which Homo sapiens learned to harness writing, math, and science to fundamentally transform mankind’s relationship to fate. For Serres, this Axial Age discovered the potency of these three forms of energy—he sees everything as the movement of energy. ‘Did they invent these powers? We do not know; the most we can say is that their sumptuous gifts to the infant Jesus represented money, science, and language’ (Religion, 20, Malcolm DeBevoise translation).
The story of the magi, in this humanistic narrative retelling, represents the equally potent discovery of religion as the binding power of these three separate powers. This binding power does not resemble these other powers however. It is not their equivalent, though it is their source.
It is far weaker and also far more powerful because it is the ‘binding’ power of religion that Serres is tracing in that final book.
Money, science, and language—powerful, learned, of noble lineage—suddenly found themselves confronted, through religion, with the qualities of weakness, poverty, humility. Strictly speaking, the Wise Men discovered religion in its nascent state. (22)
Incarnation, Hot Spots, Short Circuits
Serres leans into the figures of the short circuit, hot spots, and incarnation especially in the first part of Religion. Somewhat akin to ‘the incandescent’ (L’Incandescent) and the branching of a format (Rameaux), these new figures name a deep mixing of energies and lineages of time. We would be hard pressed to give these figures a singular definition, but what emerges in this re-reading of the magi’s epiphany is the power of emptiness—the emptiness that can become anything.
Think of the stem cell, which is the cell that can become any other cell. This becoming requires a movement away from the stem—the becoming of the rameaux (branch) or the clinamen. At that moment of branching—the declination of the clinamen—the branch takes its own trajectory, not independent of the branch but not a copy of it either.
Think of the letter ‘p’, which is empty of meaning but becomes powerful when combined with other letters. The evolution from cuneiform to the alphabet is part of the Axial Age’s discovery of essentially empty powers that can bind together other things to give them meaning.
The relatively few letters of the Phoenician’s alphabet—slimmed down considerably from the symbols of cuneiform—can be combined to form any word. Just so, the power of money as ‘the universal equivalent’ is empty of meaning by itself but when combined with other things markets emerge where anything can be exchanged for anything else due to this universal equivalent.
But religion is not the equivalent of these other powers. It is the recognition that this is how power works—the power that is empty of meaning but capable of becoming any meaning. It is the basis of the powers the magi represent and discover. ‘Kings bowed down before the powerless newborn child: money bowed down before homeless poverty; science bowed down before ignorance; language bowed down before silence…’ (24).
They represent, in other words, ‘the short circuit among four universal networks, between our immanent powers and the extreme transcendent weakness on which they depend’ (22).
Religion, Power, Experience
The etymology of the word religion certainly means binding and combining, but it may also carry with it the meaning of re-reading. This binding power that can be re-read makes Serres’ narrative of the magi an act of religion.
This is the experience of religion that Serres seeks to bring about, especially in his later works. He is tracing humanity’s ongoing confrontation with fate, and in the process our discovery of how to harness energy to shape history in our own image. At the end of the Pan section of The Incandescent, he spells it out clearly:
As technologies ‘advance’, the list, for example, of energies we propose to exploit grows longer: muscular, animal, mechanical, solar, wind, hydraulic, electrical, nuclear, computing and, again, biological. (134)
‘Will this list one day be closed?’ he asks. ‘We don’t know.’ But this ongoing movement of discovering and exploiting different energies is what humans do—it defines our hominescence.
This is why religion—as the capacity to re-read the past to find more and more connections between us and the universe—was an essential final statement for Serres. Tracing these connections is never done; there are always more angles, more lineages, more threads. Our capacity to become various versions of Pan—Panchrone, Pantone, Pangloss, Panurge—is the religious capacity to experience more connections, but also to assess and steer our empty but expansive power in directions that ideally lead to better outcomes for humanity and the nature we inhabit.
This brief essay is part of my series on the work of Michel Serres.
Read more of my takes on religion.
For a contrasting but related take on religion, see my essay on Bataille, Religion, Experience.