The Weight of the World

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay focuses upon MIchel Serres’s etymological connection between peser (to weigh) and penser (to think, or judge). I take Serres to mean the weight of the world is a judging or rendering that takes place without human intention, but which places us into a new relation with the world itself. This shift occurs in his notion of the ‘parasite’ as ‘noise’, meaning the noise of the world in its complexity, and also as a ‘third’ that shifts the balance of relationships that compose the world. Such is the complexity of ‘things’: tangles of relations from which human experience and thinking first arise. The background noise of Serres’s earlier work is the confluence of science and violence whose emblematic event, its ‘third’, is the bombing of Hiroshima, whereas his later work concerns the noise of the climate crisis. In tracing this shift, I emphasize Serres’s identification with Hermes, the deliverer of messages. The point of messages is not to understand them but to receive their transmission. I suggest that Serres’s work is to intervene in this transmission: it is a parasitic performance aiming to deliver new messages and to change the balance in our relation to things.