Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

68 theory

42. Hayles,Posthuman, 291.


43. Hayles,Posthuman, 290.


44. Hayles,Posthuman, 289. Hayles finds one of the most striking explications
    of this logic in Edwin Hutchins’ rereading of John Searle’s “Chinese room,” which
    Searle intended as an argument against the notion that machines can think: “In
    Hutchins’ neat interpretation, Searle’s argument is valuable precisely because it
    makes clear that it is not Searle but the entire room that knows Chinese. In this dis-
    tributed cognitive system, the Chinese room knows more than do any of its compo-
    nents, including Searle. The situation of modern humans is akin to that of Searle in
    the Chinese room.”


45. In this direction, the positions developed by thinkers such as Hayles and Tay-
    lor might be seen as extensions of Heidegger’s approach to worldhood inBeing and
    Time, where the irreducibly relational—and pragmatic—character of worldhood
    would prevent its reduction to an object of representation.


46. Serres,Hominescence, 14.


47. From this perspective, our relation to the task of human self-creation is
    much like the writer’s relation to his work in Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of
    literature: “Either: as an interior project [the work] is everything it ever will be, and
    from that moment the writer knows everything about it that he can learn, and so will
    leave it to lie there in its twilight, without translating it into words, without writing it—
    but then he won’t ever write: and he won’t be a writer. Or: realizing that the work
    cannot be planned, but only carried out, that it has value, truth, and reality only
    through the words which unfold it in time and inscribe it in space, he will begin to
    write, but starting from nothing and with nothing in mind—like a nothingness work-
    ing in nothingness, to borrow an expression of Hegel’s” (“Literature and the Right to
    Death,” inThe Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George
    Quasha [Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1999], 362).


48. Michel Serres,L’Incandescent(Paris: Le Pommier, 2003).


49. Serres,Hominescence, 49.


50. Serres,Hominescence, 182.


51. Serres,Hominescence, 164.


52. Serres,Hominescence, 163.


53. Serres,Hominescence, 165.


54. Serres, in Michel Serres and Bruno Latour,Conversations on Science, Culture,
    and Time(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 172.


55. Serres,Hominescence, 180.


56. It is worth noting here that the association of location with definition or cir-
    cumscription is decisive to the mystical insistence that God cannot be located. On
    this, see my essay “Locating the Mystical Subject,” inMystics: Presence and Aporia,
    eds. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
    2003).


57. Serres,Hominescence, 181.


58. Serres,Hominescence, 183.


59. On this theme in Gregory of Nyssa, one of the first to formulate the issue,
    and in Eriugena, who transports the theme into the Latin West, see, again, my “Locat-
    ing the Mystical Subject.”