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Reading The Incandescent: Human Scale and Accursed Shares
This essay reads Michel Serres’s The Incandescent as an argument that modern ethics must be extended, not replaced, to meet the speed and scale of global, computational human activity. Drawing on accursed shares, Pan, and traditions of impulse control from Stoicism and Christianity, it shows how moral life today depends on individual refusals of violence that dissipate harm locally even as consequences propagate globally.
Inventing Behavior After the Neolithic: Michel Serres and the Moral Problem of Auto-Evolution
This essay introduces Michel Serres’ late philosophy by emphasizing its moral core rather than its metaphysics. Drawing on The Incandescent and le Grand Récit, it explores auto-evolution, violence, and the challenge of inventing moral orientation after the Neolithic age.
Fate, Computation and the End of Christian Time
This brief essay traces how Enlightenment calculation reshaped humanity’s experience of time, fate, and foresight—from biblical chronology to geological deep time and modern predictive control. Rather than condemning the Enlightenment, it argues for renewing its legacy by learning how to live responsibly within the futures we now help to compute.
Michel Serres: The Synthetic Experience of Religion
This essay offers an accessible introduction to Michel Serres’s philosophy through his final book Religion. It explains how concepts like clinamen, emptiness, and navigation help us understand responsibility, violence, and meaning in modern life.
The Natural Contract - Michel Serres
Michel Serres at his most political. This 1990 book is a defining work in the modern understanding of the climate crisis. I've written a long essay inspired by the depth and breadth of Serres vision.
The Parasite - Michel Serres
An essay on how to use 'the parasite' as an operational concept that expands our capacity for experience.
At the Edge of le Grand Récit
An essay exploring Michel Serres’s engagement with Le Grand Récit and what narrative uncertainty means for ethical life in a world of multiplicity and contingent connection.
L’Incandescent – Serres on Emergence, Light, and Moral Attention
An essay exploring Michel Serres’s concept of the incandescent — where light, unpredictability, and moral attention emerge at thresholds beyond calculation and control.
Birth of Physics - Michel Serres
Michel Serres makes Lucretius our contemporary. Published just before Le Parasite, Le Naissance de la physique was a key moment in the history of chaos theory and the ability to see order emerging from disorder -- a reversal of the Enlightenment's formula. Serres finds in Lucretius' De rerum natura a pre-Modern text that offers a more relevant way of thinking about order and disorder free of eternal natural laws.