Lilian Kroth

This paper is concerned with a critique of law that is seagoing: it unpacks notions such as a “seagoing pact,” the metaphor of the “cord” or the idea of “bringing the oceans to the court.” Touching on main questions in the field of the blue humanities, this paper makes a case for Michel Serres’s distinguished contribution through his philosophy of law, in which the sea plays a vital role both on a structural and metaphorical level. At the core of this analysis is the intersection between the model of fluidity and a concept of boundary, encompassing both natural and legal limitation. It aims to specify how Serres’s work on nautical metaphors and his philosophy of law come together via his topological approach, especially evident in The Birth of Physics, Rome, Geometry, The Natural Contract, Atlas, and Hominescence. Following his narrative, topologically conceived limits can be understood as inclusive and symbiotic, broadening an understanding of limits as merely exclusive and parasitical in nature. The expression “sound judgment” will be used to make sense of a philosophy of law which brings “listening” to an ethical-legal level and therefore combines environmental justice with sensibility.

Despite Michel Serres’s caution with figures of the limit, border, and boundary which philosophy and social theory put into play, his work can fruitfully be read as a proposal to rethink limits for a social and natural contract. By following up on the intimate connection between limits and law in his work, this paper shines a light on Serres’s argument for a parallelism of limits and laws; and particularly highlights the partially underacknowledged role of entropy for this matter. First, attention will be drawn to the role of topological boundaries for Serres’s structural consideration of a natural contract in a number of his works (e.g., The Natural Contract, Atlas, Hominescence), in order to demonstrate the indispensable connection between topological boundaries, a topologically conceived ethics, and a topological approach to law. This grounds the argument for a second step, which will focus on the role of entropy and entropic difference for his understanding of processes of social organization as well as a proposal of a “new natural contract.” Similarly, this will emphasize the linkages between entropic figures of the limit and respective conceptions of a contract. This “new natural contract,” as Serres calls it, not only goes a long way in connecting themes around thermodynamic and informational entropy of the early Hermès series to his later employments of entropy in social theory, but also integrates different criticisms of his earlier natural contract and critiques of a Western-centric form of naturalism. The aim of this paper is to show that Serres’s approach to entropy engenders a reconsideration of a natural contract that not only thoroughly integrates his own non-essentialist and non-dualistic understanding of nature, but that opens up a horizon of resonances with feminist and postcolonial critiques of the Anthropocene.

This paper looks at the theoretical practice of “critique” in the work of Michel Serres and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, focusing especially on the notion of parasitism and femininity. The co-reading shines a light on the crossings of their approaches, like a critique of “laboratory” - like conditions and a masculinist understanding of rationalism. Furthermore, it brings attention to some productive divergences. With Tsing’s approach, this paper reflects critically on Serres’s understanding of femininity and extents his philosophical elaboration of parasites and fungi with a feminist, ecological and anthropological perspective. Serres, on the other hand, contributes with his multi-faceted figure of the “third” crucially to structural reflections on the relation between fungi and femininity, as well as to an understanding of “critique” from the “middle”, beyond the “battle of the two”.

This chapter examines spatial aspects of the politics of difference by reading Nietzsche along with Foucault and Deleuze. Deleuze invokes Nietzsche with his concepts of power and force, considering them in terms of a topology of difference. Inspired by Nietzsche, Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity generates a radical form of perspectivism, a productive form of critique and an opposition to territorial originality. Focusing on the political implications of Deleuze’s understanding of spatiality, the chapter leads to a confrontation with postcolonial discourse that revolves around philosophical conceptions of space. In the 1980s, Spivak expressed strong criticisms of the underlying Eurocentrism of Deleuze’s (and Foucault’s) concepts of subjectivity, pluralism and power. By adapting this critique, this chapter argues that there is also a productive reading of Deleuze’s politics of difference, which entails a counter-narrative to an essentialised Eurocentric subject.

It is, according to Serres, the ‘greatest discovery of history that entropy and information are connected’ – a line of thought he takes throughout epistemological questions, aesthetics, cultural analysis, and a theory of matter. By following Serres’s work, one finds negentropy, entropy, chaos, local orders, the ‘soft’, and the ‘hard’ almost everywhere in his writings. The intellectual context and sources that Serres draws on are an important support to understand the way in which the coupling of informational and thermodynamic entropy takes place, and how it becomes a key operator of entropic differentiation. This text draws a combinatorial map of how Serres connects understandings of entropy across a range of areas of knowledge. In this specific context, Serres’s path of translation harnesses the so-called ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ forms of entropy in looking at literature and arts, yet also to discuss social phenomena and the formations of societies. By drawing attention to the negative spaces in Serres’s connective path of translating entropies, and in the course of reading his work in context with other philosophies of entropy, this section aims to explore Serres’s translations in the way it both connects and leaves gaps. Approaching Serres’s criticality in this way brings one to the critical, difficult, icy landscapes of the North-West-Passage and the role it plays in his work. The North-West-Passage epitomises a ‘method’ to conceive the difficult path between the natural sciences and the humanities – exactly the kind of path that ‘entropy’ often meanders on. In fact, entropy itself plays an important role in regard the icy landscape’s ecology, e.g. to the degree to which the passage is melted or frozen, and thus, to the possibility of the passage as such. By bringing these multi-layered aspects of entropy as a material, aesthetic, and critical factor together, this contribution places Serres’s take on entropy as an eco-critical path in the face of the melting of icy landscapes.

This paper is concerned with Michel Serres’s critique of property. Through the concept of ‘le propre,’ which in French can mean both ‘clean’ and ‘one’s own,’ and a naturalist reading of Rousseau, he proposes a ‘stercorian’ eco-criticism of property. Focusing on concepts of limits provides a fruitful angle from which to illuminate Serres’s critique of law and property. The first section will introduce Serres as a thinker of limits, borders, and boundaries. In the second and third parts, attention will be drawn to his eco-criticism of law and property from a feminist and philosophy of science perspective, concluding with a fourth part, in which Serres’s approach will be contextualized in relation to other naturalisms. His work has far-reaching consequences for discourses of human agency in the context of the Anthropocene and makes a crucial contribution to how a new naturalist criticism of property might be conceived.

Michel Serres’s philosophy of entropy takes what he famously calls the ‘Northwest Passage’ between the sciences and the humanities. By contextualizing his approach to entropy and affirming the role of a philosophy of difference, this paper explores Serres’s approach by means of ‘entropic differences’. It claims that entropy – or rather, entropies – provide Serres with a paradigmatic case for critical translations between different domains of knowledge. From his early Hermès series, through to The Birth of Physics and later writings on social and ethical themes, he keeps thermodynamical and informational – or ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ – understandings of entropy apart, while simultaneously exploring their relation. By focusing on the systematic significance of Serres’s ‘entropic difference’, this paper shows how it unfolds not necessarily as an ontological difference but as an operative function between the history and philosophy of science, epistemology, and a theory of negentropic (inter)subjectivity.