The passage follows the historical form of a gradual replacement of emphasis, where a former model, stressing the role of the adversary and implicating the scientist in a quasi-military calling, is relaxed in place of a new one whose object has emerged out of an intensifying focus on the problems of mediation. In philosophy and across the disciplines today a similar set of questions, albeit more obscurely, underwrites the escalating expression of an already widespread concern with the passage from nominally economic systems (systems of production) to novel ecological rationalities (relational or cooperative arrangements). These kinds of possibility can be perceived in the crossing of remediated passages as they turn back across their own tracks. Difficulties concerning the space of a possible connection consistently mark Serres’s philosophy, in which he considers the medium in terms of the technical determination of the connective interval. We equivocate between mythos and cosmos because the precise yet elusive form of a connection that endures between them, between multifarious traditions of storytelling-the saga, the fable, the tale-and the natural sciences, helps establish the problem to which Serres’s philosophy consistently responds: inquiries generally concerning mediation and, with the stakes raised, of remediation, of recursive systems and the becoming-meta-media of the medium. But if we have learned to eliminate the pains of the body by operating various technologies of mediation, then the question arises: whither misfortune in this palliative age? The manner of replacement occurs within and as a significant moment of a larger mythopoetic or cosmological narrative arc, which specifies the space of origination as an opening towards its own end in the entropic heat death of a given universe. More prosaically: a way of life directed by the forces of mediation has replaced one previously managed by the forces of production. He refers to the specific structure of a fabulous récit, in which Hermes replaces Prometheus in the care of world affairs. The later writings of Michel Serres seem to take a generalizing turn. Thus, our body alleviated its pains (Serres, 2019: 17). Hermes, the god of intermediaries and translators, the Angels bearing messages and their incalculable number, took the place of Prometheus, the old solitary hero of fire. The space of the world is described as requiring artful connection (Serres, 1983: 48). KeywordsĪccident, Algebra, Communication, Cosmology, Fractals, Information, Mythology, Noise, Ontology Serres affirms science (almost singularly) as the condition on which the species might continue its adventure into the future, and in the process he establishes a position that may challenge ecologically oriented discourses. If science proceeds, first in its Hellenic dawn, and more recently in seventeenth century arithmetic, then it must be disabused of its war-game attitude. The article rediscovers within his overt Hellenism a figure of the Anthropos affirmed in the Sophist philosophies that Plato had set out to destroy. In this article I analyse the terms of the transition in Serres’s affirmation of a philosophy grounded in the potential for connection between the traditions of storytelling and the sciences of connection. Readings of Serres tend to affirm in this transition the opening to an ecology (econarratology or media-ecology) or towards a replacement of the human in trans- or post-humanism. Michel Serres’s work traces a historical transition where technologies of mediation replace a framework of life formerly managed by an economics of production. PHILLIPS National University of Singapore The Accident in Being : Michel Serres on the Emergence of the Object JOHN W. The version of record is available here:

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