Symposium

Volume 19, Issue 1, Spring 2015

Schelling After Theory

The Terrifying Concupiscence of Belonging: Noise and Evil in the Work of Michel Serres

In this paper, I examine the conception of evil and the prescriptions for its mitigation that Michel Serres has articulated in his most recent works. My explication of Serres’s argument centres on the claim, advanced in many different texts, that practices of exclusion, motivated by what he calls “the terrifying concupiscence of belonging,” are the primary sources of evil in the world. After explicating Serres’s argument, I examine three important objections, concluding that Serres somewhat overestimates the role of exclusion in perpetuating evil and that his prescriptions for mitigating evil are excessively optimistic.