Michel Serres and the parasitic unmaking of modernity

This article uses Michel Serres’s notions of the parasite and the natural contract to develop a counter-narrative to the modern idea of the state of nature. Foundational to modern thought, the state of nature motif both retroactively legitimates the social contract it is said to precede, and has also been deployed in defence of multiple forms of racism and colonialism. It is, furthermore, a mise en abyme of a characteristic threefold gesture of flattening, partition and normalisation that characterises multiple domains of modernity. In rewriting the state of nature, therefore, Serres is addressing and problematising a much broader range of features that subtend and shape the modern world. The article argues that Serres’s parasitic paradigm challenges each moment of modernity’s threefold gesture, replacing flattening with noise, partition with parasitism, and normalisation with symbiosis. The Serresian unmaking of modernity that issues from this re-inscription not only subverts the explicit doctrines of the social contract tradition but also offers an alternative to its fundamental attitude or ethos, not merely opposing modernity but charting a course out of its pathological self-destructiveness.