modernity and the mystical 63The emergence of such “world-objects,” which goes hand in hand with
today’s irreducibly technoscientific processes of globalization, yields a “new
universe” that would challenge the modern philosophy of domination and pos-
session insofar as that philosophy is founded on a clear and stable division of
the subject from the object—a division thanks to which alone the subject might
hope finally to comprehend and thereby control an objectified reality. And just
as the character of “object” here changes fundamentally, so too does that of
“subject”; the subject emerging in Serres’s thought is no longer the self-
grounding or self-possessed individual subject of modern thought (Descartes,
Locke, etc.) but rather a thoroughly relational and interactive “we,” an irreduc-
ibly collective and emergent subject whose distributed intelligence and agency
make impossible any discrete or punctuallocationof the subject. From this
angle, philosophy would need to reexamine its basic categories and concepts:
The subject, objects, knowledge, action...all[were] constructed for
millenia under the condition of localities whose divisions defined,
among other things, a subject-object distance along which knowl-
edge and action played themselves out. The measure of that [subject-
object] distance conditioned [knowledge and action]. Divisions, prox-
imities, distance, measure...these finitudes that were precondi-
tions to our theories and practices are being undone today, where
we are passing into a larger theater and where we are losing our fin-
itude.^58If, as Serres argues, we are losing our finitude today in demonstrable ways,
if we are indeed undoing the kinds of spatial and temporal limit that have long
defined us, the boundaries of subject and object, then the human “itself ” like-
wise grows increasingly difficult or even impossible to locate clearly or define
securely. The category of the human, indeed, can seem to prove endlessly
plastic, open-ended, or indeterminate—and it would be in this sense especially
that our technoscientific re-creation of the human recalls the thinking of mys-
tical tradition, where the human subject, like the God in whose image the
subject is created, can prove at bottom incomprehensible because unbounded
or indefinite.^59
An indeterminacy or in-definition of the human, then, would seem inex-
tricably bound to its creative and self-creative capacities, and in this direction,
as Serres suggests, the human would move always within a constitutive gap
between self-knowledge and practical power—a gap recalling at once the deep-
est traditions of mystical reflection and the most contemporary disjunction,
noted above with Derrida, between our scientific knowledge and our techno-
logical know-how:What is man? That beast who refuses to know who it is, because all
of its fortune consists precisely in not knowing this [a` l’ignorer]. For