1/ Serres’ 1983 ‘Détachment: Apologue' is an important “bridge” work in that very important sequences of books in the 1980s from ‘Genesis’ to ‘The Natural Contract’.
2/ It does have an obscure English translation, I believe, which I have never got hold of. There is also a useful chapter in Maria Assad’s book on Serres & Time.
3/ The opening scenario of 'Détachment' depicts a Chinese agricultural landscape filled & saturated with cultivation: “tout est consommé” .
4/ What is grown here are crops that yield with most abundance, including rice, corn and soya, an Edenic bounty: “seul est admis ce qui va jusqu’a la plenitude”.
5/ Irrigation channels & streams perforate the landscape, these too contributing to the saturation of the whole.
6/ There are paths, human-engineered & rectilinear, but these too are overgrown and seem only to punctuate an immensity of landscape that lies behind, containing more saturated life.
7/ Agriculture here is a wave, an inundation, a totality. Its bounty bespeaks something of the modernist, utopic dream of regulated infinitude, & pays no attention to planetary boundaries.
8/ It elicits in the narrator a sense of fear: “elle a tout supprimé devant elle, tout interdit et tout chasse. Elle triomphe absolument et sans partage”. The landscape seems to evoke a sense of chaotic, aleatory history itself being closed down & regulated.
9/ This echoes the description of the saturated landscape of the Garonne that Serres offered two years later in 'The Five Senses': “a white, virginal coat, open fields where monotonous corn, disturbingly, occupies the space as far as the horizon, ugly and greenish”.
10/ In that text, Serres likens this homogenous landscape to the uniformity imposed by monotheism over the archaic pagan ragtag: “we homogenize the pagan tatter, technology tramples over the altars: the old gods of the byways destroyed, tenure and boundaries abolished” ...
11/ Monotheism creates “an isotropic space, and to achieve that it was first of all necessary to kill the idols” (The Five Senses, p.236).
12/ There is nothing precise or literal about this deployment of the concept. Here, "monotheism" is a trope. A similar use occurs in later works in political theology: eg. Jan Assmann, “The Price of Monotheism” & then Peter Sloterdijk, “Shadow of Mount Sinai” & “After God”.

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More from @AimeTim

27 Aug
1. Carl Schmitt's 1923 essay "Roman Catholicism and Political Form" is essential for understanding the political theological roots of his juridical thought, & how this has been misused in contemporary integralist thought.
2. Schmitt argues that concept of the political is encoded in the power of personalist representation. Representation refers to the function of representing a value or concept of importance, of staking a claim, of claiming something that is meaningful.
3. Representation must be "personal" or "personalist" for Schmitt because it demands a sort of moral stake on behalf of the human: this contrasts with the sort of banal presentation of reality made to us in the economic/ technical thinking of modernity.
Read 6 tweets
17 Aug
1. Via the work of Bloch, Bauman & Mannheim, and as vividly depicted in Jacob Taubes’ work on “occidental eschatology”, the concept of utopia went through a seismic conceptual re-appropriation in the 20th century.
2. That is to say, the concept of “utopia” became positively re-deployed as a framework for literary & artistic production, and as a tool to relate social theory to social praxis.
3. A good example is “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World” catalogue of 2001, & Ruth Levinas’ sociological work on “Utopia as Method”.
Read 11 tweets
2 Apr
1/ The tenth chapter of @BrunoLatourAIME’s Où suis-je? pivots from how the pandemic has challenged the ideological structures of modernity (the Economy, the object, Nature), to the way it has caused us to rethink the intimate & apparently subjective site of the human body itself. Image
2/ Latour rejects simple dichotomies of objective materiality to which is added “mon corps vécu de l’intérieur, celui de ma subjectivité” (p.120).
3/ Crucially, & poignantly, Latour explains that he has been reminded of this by his own, very sad experience of cancer over the last two years, that I know he has faced with dignity and good faith.
Read 18 tweets
16 Mar
1/ I am continuing my chapter-by-chapter summary of @BrunoLatourAIME’s new book, où suis-je. Here, we come to the ninth chapter. For previous chapter threads, do scroll down on my feed. Image
2/ Latour begins by recounting his participation in a piece of performance art designed by architect & urban planner Soheil Hajmirbaba that visualises attachments & dependences in a group by means of a compass diagram drawn on the floor that is traversed. s-o-c.fr/index.php/abou…
3/ This highlights the artificiality & brutality of any art that interrupts movement in order to fix it on a wall. For Latour, this is quintessentially represented by the “white cube” gallery aesthetic characterised by its square shape, white walls & elevated light source. Image
Read 11 tweets
7 Mar
1/ Continuing my threads on Où suis-je? (see previous threads) – chapter 6 provides an example of @BrunoLatourAIME’s constructive interpretation of Christianity as a religion that can inculcate forms of attentiveness & responsibility with respect to our Gaian interconnectedness. Image
2/ Lockdown has been interesting for “les âmes religieuses”: after all, these people normally have their eyes fixed on the hereafter, & yet lockdown has forced them to appreciate the significance of the “ici-bas”, for a while at least! (p.66).
3/ The religious “above” was never intended to indicate a topography or spatiality; rather, “l’envol vers un au-delà de paix, de recompense et de salut” (p.67) was intended to inspire forms of sympathy, co-belligerence & peace for those who live down here, the poor & downtrodden.
Read 15 tweets
1 Mar
1/ And so I continue my reading of @BrunoLatourAIME’s new book, "où suis-je?". The fifth chapter, entitled ‘Troubles d’engendrement en cascade’, asks what have been the diagnostic effects of lockdown. What have we learnt from this dreadful experience?
2/ No doubt we all agree that lockdown has prompted a sort of generalised concern, “une angoisse partagée par tous”, with respect to the terms of our shared existence with others & how this needs to stay the same or change in the future.
3/ In the political realm, it has exacerbated the tenor of certain existential questions: how to prevent the collapse of the modes of life we had come to rely on? (hence the discourse of “extinction” in XR & other movements, as charted by Danowski & Viveiros de Castro) ... Image
Read 13 tweets

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