Porous becomings: Anthropological engagements with Michel Serres By AndreasBandak, Daniel M.Knight, Durham: Duke University Press. 2024. 344 pp.

In Porous Becomings, a stellar roster of anthropologists takes up the thought of philosopher Michel Serres. Several critical appreciations and retrospectives have followed his passing in 2019, and this well-timed contribution from anthropology is clearly a labor of love. It stems from editors Andreas Bandak and Daniel Knight's own serendipitous encounters with “Serres moments” (15) that captured their imaginations and spoke to their ethnographies. A capacious introduction and conversational afterword with Jane Bennett convey their vision for a Serresian anthropology that forges daring and unexpected connections, folding and twisting them in a spirit of playful exploration. Who was Serres, exactly, and why now? The introduction offers a helpful overview, and different chapters refer to his time as a naval officer and mountaineer, and his childhood haunted by the horrors of Hiroshima. In some ways, he was “another French white philosopher” (ix), studying under Georges Canguilhem and thus of the same generation as Deleuze and Foucault. He would go on to produce an extraordinary body of work but remained something of a voice in the wilderness, prophetic but marginal. His bid to find a Northwest Passage linking science and the humanities resonates with feminist science and technology studies and actor-network theory (Candea), but there is a streak of French rationalism too, a “transformational structuralism” (241) evident in his doctoral work on Leibniz and that today resonates with ontologists like Viveiros de Castro and Descola (Corsín Jiménez; introduction). Like Lévi-Strauss, Serres had a beautiful sense for analogic correspondence—parasites are guests, angels are communication technologies, comedy is a feast. And while analogies are generative leaps across domains, they are also systematic, bringing things into relation. This “algorithmic universalism” (119) makes him an intuitive companion for anthropologists, who are always trying to surf the cresting wave of difference in similarity (and vice versa). Many of the chapters circle around two of his most well-known concepts, the parasite and the natural contract. The lesson of le parasite—whether social, biological, or informatic—is that relational flows are vulnerable to blockage and diversion; reciprocity and fair dealing can always be abused. In West Africa, according to Michael Jackson, this could be a rebel militia emerging from the bush to plunder the village, or a gerontocrat cannibalizing the life chances of his offspring. In what is destined to be a classic rereading of Mauss, Andrew Shryock suggests that gifts and hospitality are often thinly veiled extortion rackets, so many strategies to domesticate such dangerous hosts or guests. But ultimately, parasitic interruption is ambiguous. The trickster may upend injustice, and the stranger may bring blessings. Entrapment may harbor its reversibility; the spiderweb is in some sense already captivated by the fly (Corsín Jiménez). The parasite as the degradation—but also evolutionary driver—of order takes on special salience in the Anthropocene. Can humans be more than parasites, digging out the earth from under them? Serres's answer—a natural contract—can seem legalistic, but it turns on a sacralizing recognition of the world and its claims upon us (Szakolczai). Celia Lowe analyzes the documentary My Octopus Teacher as a compelling example of just such a contract, the interactional play and mutual captivation between human and cephalopod recalling Alberto Corsín Jiménez's odes to “melodic contaminations” (42). If Serres speaks to anthropological concerns with collective life, he can also “tilt … toward the cosmic,” as Jane Bennett observes (280). This is the Serres of Genesis (1995), attuned to the background noise of roiling potentiality that precedes all form. In a bracing chapter, Elizabeth Povinelli suggests that Black and feminist traditions can highlight the social stakes of this tilt. What of actual bodies in extreme becoming—a mother giving birth, the kidnapped subject of the Middle Passage? It is along such lines that David Henig reflects on the toxic legacy of military waste in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its ability to decompose time. Wars start; do they ever end? Knight describes a similar existential vertigo of recurring crises in Greece, while Stavroula Pipyrou evokes the flame-like dance of similarity and difference that Grecanici and Pontian minority groups must embody to negotiate the state. These chapters thus work to bring Serres's ambient realm of potentiality into the anthropological register of history and biography. Other chapters underscore Serres as a thinker of the milieu, the middle ground between open dissolution and sterile closure. How do we humans get the mix of porosity right, so that the right things get in and the wrong things stay out (Brown)? As Tom Boylston shows in a standout chapter on Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, this is a question of bodily “prepositions”—of submitting to various prosthetic extensions or intercessions. We beseech angels to carry our prayers, fast to enliven our spiritual attentions; or, if we are stand-up comics, really commit to the bit, often at the cost of our own sincerity (Nielsen). That is, we adopt constraints that organize our communication with the world, bringing us into relation with it. Mediation is thus at the heart of a Serresian wisdom relevant to, and resonant with, anthropology. Any relation is a kind of sacrifice. It involves entering a possibility space—a milieu—in which some things may pass and others may not. And yet such milieus may be porous in unexpected ways; they may be parasited or otherwise go awry. The angel might fall, or the comic might burn out. Matei Candea points out that Serres's own method exemplifies this wisdom. He consciously—metacommunicatively—gives us his philosophy of the world through the medium of image and figure, from Hermes to Balzac to the Challenger explosion. He foregoes telling for showing, exposition for inspiration. As with any sage, the risk is that the reader is baffled or annoyed, but the reward is that they are exhilarated and farsighted. Porous Becomings takes this bet too. It invites us to dive in and explore connections across its lively chapters, following the whorls and eddies of Serres's thought becoming anthropological. The portal is open.