COVID-19 Viral Logics, Social Inequality and Hegemonic Mimicry: Deconstructing the Language of Cultural Parasite

Drawing on Michel Serres’ philosophical notion of the parasite, this essay examines human responses to COVID-19 that mimic parasitic behavior and uncovers social inequalities by exploring the cultural hegemony of viral logics perpetuated by the media. How can Serres’ notion of the parasite help us reconfigure structural inequalities experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic? First, the essay examines the viral logic of internalization, which seeks to normalize, if not appropriate, the impact of the pandemic through the rhetoric of togetherness. This particular viral logic induces people to internalize the coronavirus pandemic’s illusion as a crisis shared equally by all. The essay argues that this viral logic of internationalization resonates with the French philosopher’s parasite logic, which, in Serres’s words, “expresses a new epistemology, another theory of equilibrium.” Second, this study examines the viral logic of correlation, which designates certain marginalized cultural groups as infected, and therefore regarded and (mis)treated like the virus itself. This blame-game behavior mimics the parasite’s violation of the host’s chain of order and the creation of a new order that is self-serving. Hence, the parasite becomes, according to Serres, “an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information.” The essay argues that although mimicry becomes the theatre of cultural inequality that dominates communication for the parasitic operator, both viral logics of parasitic mimicry eventually slip into mockery.

Monologue and Organization Studies

In this essay, we propose that recent work in management and organization studies is typically inclined to understand organization and organizing as dialogic in form. Dialogicity is characterized by dynamic interlocution on the part of active human sense-makers and, in our critical reading, evokes a romanticized social landscape that fails to reflect the more prosaic features of organizational life. To address what we see as certain limitations of the dialogic view, we introduce a complementary point of reference: that of monologic organization. This perspective provokes reflection on those situations in which meanings are predetermined at the outset and communication consists of the strictly controlled, routine reproduction of formal scripts. We draw on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Serres to reclaim monologic as a pertinent view of organization and its processes. Finally, we provide micro, meso and macro level examples to illustrate and discuss the heuristic potential of a monologic view.

Réécritures contemporaines autour de la notion identitaire : vers l’hypernarcissisme ?

"Since Socrates famously stated “Know yourself”, the term identity has been redefined on multiple occasions and from different perspectives. The contemporary and postmodern era provides interesting nuances based on notions such as “dynamic rooting” (Maffesoli), “hominescence” (Michel Serres), or “personalization”, “desubstantialization”, and “hypernarcissism” (Lipovestky). In the light of a figure such as that of Narcissus, which emerges without taboos in the “era of emptiness”, I will address the notion of identity in the fictional work of two French authors, namely Sylvie Germain and Laurent Gaudé."

Die Raumfahrt der Gesellschaft

Alle Menschen sind Astronaut*innen - nachzulesen nicht nur bei Buckminster Fuller, sondern auch bei Michel Serres. Aber was bedeutet es, die Raumfahrt als gesellschaftliches Projekt zu reflektieren? Dieser Frage gehen die Beiträger*innen des Bandes im Hinblick auf die zwei wichtigen Dimensionen Wirtschaft und Kultur nach, die in Verbindung miteinander betrachtet werden. Die Analysen verdeutlichen, wie sich das technische Großprojekt der Raumfahrt in die Gesellschaft eingeschrieben hat, und lassen schlussfolgern, dass die Raumfahrt kein reines Elitenprojekt bleiben kann.

The Inclusive Philosophy of Michel Serres for Our Time of Crisis

Michel Serres’s philosophy is scantly known outside France. In this review essay the author takes up three books that Serres published late on in his life and that engage in different ways with the environmental emergency. These short eminently readable books appeal to a wide audience and at the same time draw together major concerns and approaches from his life’s work. In each of the three books, Serres explores the preconditions for, and the emerging sense of, a contract between humans and the rest of the natural world.

More-than-human geographies: an encounter with Serres’ universality

The aim of this article is to demonstrate that some pertinent questions posed by diverse forms of more-than-human geographies can be explored innovatively and imaginatively by an encounter with Michel Serres’ philosophy. I explore some central ideas that run through more-than-human geographies, with a particular emphasis on those generated by feminist new materialists and decolonial thought. A snapshot of three potentially productive encounters with Serres’ investigations is explored: the audacious alignment of modern physics with Lucretian atomism; a non-representational philosophy of sensations that teases out the intimate relations between the body and thought; and diverse lessons from recent discoveries in science of the commonality of all living and inert matter. I argue that all three contribute to a philosophy that increasingly turns towards the formation of a decentred universal humanism. To clarify Serres’ distinctiveness, I contrast the latter with those who advocate a decolonial pluriversality. Overall, I indicate ways in which Serres’ thought confirms and challenges more-than-human approaches to geography and discloses inventive trajectories of thought.

Michel Seress’ Integumentum, or Why Ecology Lies (Also) Beyond Arguments

During the Middle Ages, integumentum was a term widely used by “intellectuals” (Le Goff) in order to unfold the function of allegory: there is no story whose signification does not echo the sacred texts, and every sacred truth needs a story to bring it to life. Integumentum was a way to make this echo explicit: a sort of “poetical coat hiding a moral or philosophical truth” (John of Garland). We want to suggest that, while no one uses integumentum anymore in order to designate the rhetoric of modern and contemporary theoretical discourse, it is in ecological theory that we may rediscover its afterlives. Hence, integumentum is not only a form of telling truths, but a form of memory, as well. In this respect, Michel Serres may be considered the first “ecological” thinker, as he avoids abstract metalanguages as much as possible, relying instead on fictions and characters in his attempt to describe the world afresh. If integumentum resurfaces as the proper way of “ecologizing,” instead of modernizing (Latour), we would like to uncover, in Michel Serres’ works, the dialectic of subjects and objects.

Entrevista com Rodrigo Braga

Entrevista com o artista Rodrigo Braga partindo de seu trabalho em vídeo intitulado Tônus. Para embasar a conversa, o trabalho Grande Budha de Nelson Félix e a ideia central do livro O Contrato Natural, de Michel Serres.