You Tube Theology

Reconstructions of Michel Serres’s social thought customarily dwell on his inflections of the contract paradigm, but this paper argues that the figure of the parasite is in fact more fundamental to Serres’s vision of the social, and indeed crucial to understanding his idea of the contract. The paper conjectures: What if the social bond is primarily parasitic, rather than contractual? It explores the resources in Serres’s thought for elaborating and exploring the possibilities of a generalised social parasitism that precedes and frames the social contract, revealing that contract to be derivative and reductive, an epiphenomenal excrescence of the parasitic paradigm. This pivot from contract to parasite as the centre of gravity of Serresian social thought casts a challenging vision of a society in which the fundamental concept of justice is radically transformed.

This talk was given at a workshop on "Michel Serres and the social" held at Queens' College, Cambridge on 21 - 22 June 2022.