Michel Serres: The Synthetic Experience of Religion
In the final days of his life, Michel Serres completed what would become his last book translated into English, Religion: Rereading What Is Bound Together. It reads as a valediction—not only to his long philosophical career, but to an entire way of thinking. Readers familiar with the works in le Grand Récit (Hominescence, The Incandescent, Branches, Humanistic Narratives) will recognize its recurring figures and gestures, but here they are gathered with unusual urgency, as if time itself were pressing the argument forward.
More forcefully than in many of his earlier works, Serres insists that we are crossing a threshold. An era shaped by analysis—by separation, classification, and reduction—is giving way to something else. In its place emerges a synthetic mode of experience, one organized around connection, linkage, and relation:
At the outset of the present work I announced the end of this era [the Analytical Age] and the advent of an age in which syntheses, linkages and connections, networks and webs of all kinds will govern our thinking and our behavior. (172)
Learning this new way of thinking—this ‘art of weaving, of tying together’—is not optional. For Serres, it is the defining task of our time out of joint. It is also the sense in which he reclaims the word religion: not as belief or doctrine, but as a way of being in the world. ‘Religions, synthetic rather than analytic,’ he writes, ‘have tried to answer universal questions. Not only do they link together, they bind together’ (170).
Analysis still matters. We need its precision and its discipline. But rejuvenation today does not come from ever finer specialization. It comes from forms of thinking, speaking, and belonging that cut across domains—across academic disciplines, professions, institutions, and systems of power—without pretending that they can be reduced to a single frame (172).
Read my reflections on experiencing the cave paintings of Tito Bustillo in Asturias, Spain, for an example of turning analysis into synthesis.
Clinamen and Emptiness
In Serres’s late works, a paradoxical figure comes to the foreground: weakness as strength, humility as power. These books are not meant simply to be read; they are meant to tilt the reader’s sense of how history, meaning, and agency begin.
In Hominescence, Eve performs this role. By eating the apple, she introduces a deviation—a clinamen—that releases time from the Garden’s stasis. History begins not with mastery or design, but with a small departure. Humanity enters time by pursuing its own purposes, without guarantees and without a script.
In Religion, Serres multiplies these figures. Money, the alphabet, mathematics, the Holy Family, hot spots, the Three Wise Men—all perform the same function. Each acts as a clinamen: a break from fixity, a deviation from the smooth, laminar flow of Lucretius’s atoms falling in parallel paths. None of these figures contains meaning in itself. Each sets something in motion.
A clinamen is neither good nor evil. Nothing is determined by its initial deviation. No matter how closely we examine it, we cannot isolate a pure moment of origin, and even if we could, it would tell us very little. We would still not know the trajectory it sets in motion, nor the speed at which consequences accumulate. The problem resembles Heisenberg’s uncertainty: we cannot know position and momentum at once. We must choose, and in choosing, accept the loss of certainty.
What matters, then, is not origin but movement. Meaning emerges along the path, through collisions, combinations, and encounters. A clinamen is empty at the start—devoid of essence—but gathers force as it moves, drawing energy from what it meets. Its significance lies not behind it, but ahead of it.
This is how I have long understood Nāgārjuna’s idea of emptiness: not as nothingness, but as attention to motion and relation. Emptiness names a world where meaning arises through connection rather than inheritance, through trajectory rather than foundation.
Several essays here reflect on emptiness as the ability to suspend the weight of culture.
Universal Equivalents
Serres was drawn to figures that are at once universal and empty—forms that mean nothing on their own yet can mean almost anything in combination. “Money, the x of algebra, the letters of the alphabet,” he writes, “though they have no meaning, can have all meanings” (16).
A single letter—p, for example—says nothing by itself. Only when it enters into relation with other symbols does meaning emerge. And yet from a small set of such empty elements, an unlimited range of meanings becomes possible. Emptiness is not a defect here; it is a condition of universality.
This is the sense in which Serres redefines religion. Religion is not a body of propositions but an experiential capacity: the ability to perceive universal equivalence running through disparate domains. It is the capacity to recognize connection without demanding reduction, relation without final explanation.
The story of the Three Wise Men makes this visible. They set out in search of power and glory—an unprecedented king, an overwhelming force capable of reshaping the world. What they encountered instead was something far stranger: information. Not domination, but a fragile signal; not strength, but an almost imperceptible deviation.
They were seeking an energy that would transform the world, locally and globally; instead they discovered the subtle, almost empty strangeness of information.
They discovered, in other words, that the nothing of power and glory is everything…. Through religion, they suddenly found themselves confronted with weakness, poverty, and humility. Strictly speaking, the Wise Men discovered religion in its nascent state. (22)
Religion appears here not as certainty but as attunement—an ability to register small signals that alter trajectories. What looks like weakness is, in fact, a new mode of power: one that works by connection rather than command.
The Problem of Evil
Religion ends by confronting the problem of evil. But Serres approaches it as he approaches everything else in le Grand Récit: without essences, without origins, without the comfort of fixed explanations. Nothing is what it is because of where it began. Everything is defined by how it moves.
So how does evil arise, if not as a substance or a cause?
As so often in Serres, the answer is navigation.
Violence is not an origin but an energy—a motive force already in motion. Its direction, however, is not fixed. Like a boat at sea, it can be diverted, redirected, or amplified depending on how it is handled. ‘Violence is an energy,’ Serres writes, ‘but its nature is capable of being modified, just as the direction of a boat can be altered by manipulating its rudder’ (180).
Here Serres draws deeply from René Girard. Evil is not born; it mutates. It gathers force through emulation, amplification, rivalries, and scapegoats. Our responsibility is not to purify origins—an impossible task—but to recognize violent trajectories early enough to interrupt them before they harden into systems.
We cannot do without this energy. Much of what humans accomplish depends on it: the force that breaks static situations open, the clinamen that releases motion where none seemed possible. But intention offers no shelter. The goodness of our purposes does not absolve us of responsibility for their downstream effects.
Our knowledge of consequences will always be partial. Effects emerge unevenly, over time, and often out of view. But this uncertainty is not an excuse for moral innocence. It is the condition that makes attentiveness necessary. The ethical question is never whether motion will occur, but whether we are prepared to notice what we have set in motion—and to ask, continually, ‘To what extent can we divert its course when it threatens to take an evil turn?’ (181)