modernity and the mystical 65ries of categories that may once have seemed (or that only now, on the verge
of their collapse and disappearance, begin to seem) fundamental—categories
such as “nature,” “life,” and “the human” “themselves,” which for many in the
contemporary world begin to appear all the more “sacred” in the measure that
they are all the more deeply called into question. As Serres writes (in a passage
that could be read quite productively in relation to the analyses that Derrida
develops in “Faith and Knowledge”), “the diffuse anxieties today surrounding
chemistry or biotechnologies, for example, bring back the old abandoned fig-
ures of ‘Nature,’ of ‘Life,’ and of ‘Man,’ [which prove] all the less defined and
all the more sacred in the measure that these fears grow. Let’s not touch ‘Man,’
say these fears, let us not violate ‘Life’ or ‘Nature,’ whose myths reappear, like
so many ghosts.”^61
According to the positions I have sketched out in this paper, we might
suspect that current efforts to resecure such categories within their fixed limits
and stable definitions will be bound to fail, yielding, indeed, figures whose
spectral quality could not but disappoint the desires—and aggravate the anxi-
eties—driving them. Both technoscience and mystical religion as we’ve
sketched them here would compel us to recognize the degree to which, in fact,
we cannot but “touch man” today—that is, work and rework, in a process of
continuous creation, “the human” “itself,” in its very “life” and “nature.” The
“human experience,” from this perspective, would prove, both in traditions of
mystical religion and in contemporary technoscience, irreducibly open and
emergent—a function of that self-creation whose ground and result alike
would be the irreducible instability of any limit or definition to the “human”
and its “experience.”
notes- Michel Serres,Hominescence(Paris: Le Pommier, 2001), 50. Translations are
mine. - Serres,Hominescence, 50.
- InFrom Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). - Weber, “Science,” 139.
- Weber, “Science,” 139.
- On this, see Serres,Hominescence, 55–57. See also the related arguments in
Serres’ subsequent workL’Incandescent(Paris: Le Pommier, 2003). - In Heidegger,The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Wil-
liam Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). - For a brief introduction to “calculative” thinking and its defining contrast with
“meditative” thinking, see Heidegger’s 1955 “Memorial Address,” inDiscourse on
Thinking, trans. John Andersen and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row,
1966). - Heidegger, “Age,” 127.