RISULTATI RICERCA

We might read L’hermaphrodite: Sarrasine sculpteur by Michel Serres trying to imagine what it would be like if it was illustrated with some of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and paintings. There is a similarity between Serres’ thought and Leonardo’s iconic production, and it is based on the idea of enantiomorphism: a kind of morphogenesis among stones, animals, letters and bodies. The incarnato, the veil, the friction between surfaces and the inversion of the senses invite us to think about a theory of multiplicity that exalts the peculiarity of each single body. Either a gay science or a pataphysics.

Dealing with the cultural performances as points of view of the contemporaneous social contest asks for the usage of complex theoretic frames, based on the mélange logical. On this base it’s possible to take into account the multi-causality and the existence of social stages in which in the society-world is visible the rising of several forms of individual and collective expressiveness. Such a dynamics of communication and performance has a shared ancestral and anthropological source, but is based on the cultural platforms of the collective contemporaneous imagery. Thus considering the forms of communication means coming back to the primary fury that marks the beginning of the social formations and the meaning of the ritual processes as a way of symbolical elaboration of violence. In addition it means tracing the social and communicative development in the artistic practices and medial performances, the ambivalence between tradition and innovation, nature and culture, rational and irrational, life and death, putting in evidence the duplicity which the hypothesis of hope rising from the Michel Serres’ lesson is based on.

Analysing how the relationship between individual and society is articulating asks for dealing with the forms of connexion between these two separate levels by the access to a median observation level of relational kind. In accordance with Michel Serres this level can be identified in the multiple, and observed in the form of the multitude, a stage of pre-aggregation that stands out on the background of the social contingence as a growing phenomenon. From this point of view the dynamics of getting other is sociologically noticeable; dynamics which is the process of virtualisation that concerns the status of contingence, interiorized by the subject and prompted by the informational technologies. This status shows itself in the body, progressively see-through, and in the constitution of community neo-forms, interpreted as plural subjectivities. Adequate contests to the renewed process of the hominescence.

In the western thought the fetish is traditionally related to an inadequate substitution in meaning and relationship construction. This interpretation is in Marx’ fetishism of the goods, in the Freud’ sexual fetishism, or in the latest conceptualisations. The Michel Serres’ thought allows us to replace the fetish, in its quality of quasi-object, in the centre of the collective production. And by the comparison with a particular kind of quasi-object, the joker, perfectly represented by money, incarnation of the abstract, it’s possible to think of the ambivalence that seems to characterize the contemporary objects, shared out between a typically social abstract symbolic and a symbolic deep-rooted in the bodies, in the Langue, in personal stories and knowledge.

The Lectio Magistralis made by Michel Serres when he has been conferred the honorary degree in Sociology at the Urbino University is basically the exposition of the conceptual categories on which Serres sets up the observation of the condition of the contemporary human being. Starting from the digression about the development of space-time categories, and the changes in the human relational dynamics caused by the new technologies, Serres leads us through the suggestions that cross imagery and memory, the story of his own anecdotes and the history of humanity. So the contemporary human being is described by keeping into account the changes of the ancient cognitive faculties, the relationship between body and objects, in the relationship between us and the others. On this base the project to share the knowledge, also interpreted as remote teaching, becomes the way to consciously integrate the contemporaneity status with the possibility of a true worldwide democracy.

A laudatio for Michel Serres might be based on the opportunity to go over again the stages of his thought, through the rich literary production and the masters whom his philosophical project is based on. The research - and in itself the passage from the natural sciences to the human sciences starts by considering the turning points of humanity toward the transcendental space of communication which characterizes Serres’ trans-disciplinary investigation. Scientific principles from Lucretius, Archimedes to Prigogines and information Theory get integrated with the anthropological philosophy that wants to find out the basis of the culture, the meaning of the artistic and literary creativity, till the hypothesis and the pedagogical proposal of the third instructed to reach the hominescence, a new rising of the human that in Serres becomes also a moral commitment of peace and love in these tragic and painful times.