Biogea
Biogea is a testimonial to the sentiment of urgency that the octogenarian philosopher experienced at the start of his final decade. Central is the idea that our Western way of knowing, our brand of science, is running aground. It has turned humankind into an invasive species that risks to collapse itself in autophagy. But Biogea, the battered Earth and all its living species, is talking back. We don't yet understand its language. What we hear is pandaemonium and it fills us with terror. "Ah, who was speaking? No one and nothing of all that spoke had any meaning. Except, precisely, the invasive struggle, the threat, the fear, a rumbling whose intensity caused in us, the way the thunder or an earthquake does, an intense anxiety in the belly and the awareness that our existence, paltry, timid, fragile, could vanish at any moment." Floods, storms, vortices and quakes are protagonists in this 200-page prose poem. Biogea rages, shouts at us with primeval noise. Serres recounts colourful autobiographical stories about his face-offs, in marine and mountainous habitats, with the unchained vitality of the living Earth.
However, it wouldn't be Serres if this were a pessimistic book. This moment of panic is also an opportunity for "re-birth, co-birth, new behaviors". This is not a time to raise the drawbridge and hide behind the crumbling parapets. To the contrary, we need a peace contract with Biogea. We need to shift from parasitism to symbiosis. And we need a new science that is able to converse with the world, this riotous and communication-saturated tapestry of coded-coding things. This is a soft science, a joyful science, a science that weaves rather than separates, that is able to think totalities. "My hope rests on the contemporary evolution of knowledge. Simple and easy, our old sciences rested on the analysis that separates and cuts up, on the cutting up that separates subjects from their objects. Hate? Difficult, global and connected, the life and Earth sciences presuppose communications, interferences, translations, distributions and passages. Love?"
Image: Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels
