The Incandescent by Serres Michel

Author:Serres, Michel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Evil

Recent I

How long did men and women live without knowing themselves? Millions of years no doubt. The Greek philosophers, to whom the aforementioned Western culture owes its conceptual frameworks, hadn’t yet invented the subject, except in a few precepts by Socrates, on the cognitive side, or Marcus Aurelius, after Epictetus, for behaviour. How and when did it appear? When the encounter of the Semitic and Greco-Latin worlds, of Roman law and Christian morality launched our era: Saint Augustine stated the cogito for the first time, and the anamnesis of his Confessions also explored the innermost recesses of a moral conscience and of an already psychological self. 14 The recommendation to save one’s soul and the proclamation of the Credo, in which faith concerns the person himself, contributed to generalizing, by giving it a destinal dimension, the subject of law, already universal, something women and slaves could finally boast about.

Despite this entirely theoretical announcement and through a persistence history gives a thousand examples of, the idea of an individual took centuries to spread in the West; the portraits described by novels and the theatre or brushed by painting rarely show the unknown, the vulgar, the common, the peasant or passerby in the street except in crowds at Flemish festivals. Princes posed for Le Nain’s Peasants, and Marie-Antoinette’s court played at milking and haymaking on the farms of Trianon. From the seventeenth century on, bills of mortality, life insurance and the law of large numbers have counted people statistically and no longer en masse like censuses. Perhaps we have to wait for the beginnings of phrenology and photography to finally catch a glimpse, among the masses, of a few quasi anonymous visages, full-face or in profile, murderers, Thénardiers, convicts, Jean Valjean, who declared to the tribunal that the poor bore names that were as few in number as the houses they lived in, Rougons and Macquarts, words signifying the red stain, thus making their genetic epic into a cycle of original sin and bloody guilt. For a long ti me only kings, nobles, the wealthy Forsytes, a few heroes and martyrs attained subject status. Only a few greatnesses by birth or exceptions of genius ensured that a person could simply become someone. The Enlightenment and the rights of man didn’t yet realize this potential universality. I’m ashamed of my country, whose hypocrisy has long claimed universal suffrage even though it only granted the right to vote to women, not yet subjects, after the Second World War; the male chauvinist oligarchy subjugated female legal minors, more than half its population. We have always lived in an aristocracy: birth, money, diplomas, merit, sex.

The ancient tragic

In Roman and later ‘natural’ law, as in Christian theology or Zola’s novels, the subject appears with a moral choice, which doesn’t go without suffering, or before the tribunals, in danger of condemnation. As juridical, ethical or salvational, responsibility produces the soul, the moral conscience or the subject of law, three I’s with names that are still anonymous. The first

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