… thrown towards the perpetual present, forming an exterior without any interior …
This is the last post from Hominescence by Michel Serres, translated by Randolph Burks (2019, 2001):
… War creates the state, which creates war, which creates History, which creates war, which creates man, which creates war — this is the catechism in as many spiraling loops taught by almost all our philosophies, armored from fights to the death, combats, brawls and debates considered not only to be normal, but to be the exclusive motors of renewal and knowledge.
[line break added] Without war, there can be no state, no history, even less can there be man, inventions or advances. From economic competition to competitive sports, cultural formations, philosophy included, are all taken to be wars continued by other means.
[line break added] This bloody civilization looks down on projects of perpetual peace, calling them utopian dreams; squabbling takes on conceptual loftiness and dignity, and peace takes on the ignominy of naïve idealism. No one does or writes History with good intentions. Never search for the causes or the reason for a war; war replaces causes and reasons.
… The universal flood of noise — sounds, music and discourse mixed together, presto e fortissimo, erasing the silence — destroys the old agency of the ‘I’ the way a thin and fragile vase would explode by dint of vibrations, to the profit of a transparency thrown towards the perpetual present, forming an exterior without any interior, weaving relations without reserving any substance for itself, sparkling multiplicities without any nucleus. Formerly a dense seed or dark bit of gravel, single and hard, the self becomes multiple, crisscrossed, mosaic and shimmering.
This is the charm of our grandchildren, closer to Montaigne and La Fontaine, harlequins, than to Descartes and Kant, dark, sad and profound. They no longer have or no longer are the same subjects. What could be worrying about that since such changes have so often adjusted the soul, white and fluid, aquatic and adjustable, possible and contingent? This morning, their innumerable smile succeeds the old, cramped confinement.
I bequeath to them the rare music and the silence.
My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 