64 theory
the first time, finally, a speculative non-knowing [non-savoir] seems
to free us in relation to a practical knowledge, about which we al-
ways affirm that it can, and knows how to, free us. For this meta-
knowledge [me ́tasavoir] would be our own unhappiness and that of
our children; it would put us back at the level of brute beasts and of
fixed plants, which themselves are something defined. We discover
the horror of any ontology. We therefore leave open the indetermina-
tion of the answer. What is man? Answer: A possibility within a
range of powers, potency, omnipotence, because he can become all.
What is man? This range itself, this omnipotence.^60From this perspective, the power of technoscientific humanity, its virtually
endless creative potential, must be understood to depend on its relative lack of
definition or determination: the more programmed the creature, the less open
in its potential; the less programmed, the more open and adaptable. Human
“nature”—and eventually “nature” more broadly—would come then to signal
not fixed law or the closure of any determinism but rather the open and in-
calculable potentiality of a birth (nascor) whose freedom stems from a depro-
gramming or forgetting, a kind of poverty or blankness that leaves the human
specifically adapted to little or nothing and therefore open to virtually all. Ech-
oing mystical thinkers dating back at least to Gregory of Nyssa (c. 332–395),
who associate the creative power both of Godandof the human subject with
an infinitude that defies definition or conception, Serres argues that techno-
scientific humanity proves to be endlessly inventive and adaptive in the mea-
sure that it lacks, at bottom, any fixed essence. As human, we cannot in essence
be defined—or we are defined by our essential lack of definition, and we might
understand this relation between our indetermination and self-creation in two
directions: on the one hand, through the kind of self-creation unfolding by
technoscientific means today, we constantly undo the limits that might ever be
taken to define us, but also, even more, we become self-creative in the first
place thanks only to such indetermination.
Hence, from a perspective that might apply as much to modern techno-
science as to traditional mystical religion, the crux of “human experience”
could turn out to be less the question of human finitude—and what may turn
to have been its many comforts—and more the question of human “in-
finitude,” where we would confront the irreducible instability or indetermi-
nation of the human “itself.” Insofar as such instability or indetermination
would be tied to a virtually boundless possibility that “grounds” human expe-
rience, it would be tied also to the complex anxieties engendered by such pos-
sibility.
One can witness the work of such anxieties in the multifaceted and often
violent responses being made on the world stage today in reaction against a
technoscience that can, as we’ve clearly suggested here, threaten the bounda-