Reading the World through Somatic Encounters with the Universe in Michel Serres's Philosophy and Sylvain Tesson's Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reading the World through Somatic Encounters with the Universe in Michel Serres's Philosophy and Sylvain Tesson's Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde Keith Moser Building upon Michel Serres's transdisciplinary, sensualist outlook on life, this article proposes a Serresian interpretation of the contemporary travel writer and nomadic explorer Sylvain Tesson's critically acclaimed essay Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde. Specifically, this exploration focuses on Serres and Tesson's attempts to rehabilitate our much-maligned five senses by demonstrating that our sensorial faculties are vital epistemological and spiritual vectors that enable us to comprehend the biosphere and our small place in it more fully. In stark contrast to dominant puritanical ideology, which cautions us to be "wary of the flesh" because the "flesh is weak," Serres and Tesson implore the alienated postmodern subject to (re)establish a direct, sensorial connection to the universe in an age epitomized by ecological deterritorialization and an environmental crisis that threatens the existence of all sentient organisms including Homo sapiens. This insatiable zeal to taste, touch, see, smell, and hear everything that life has to afford during our ephemeral time on this earth is the heart of an ontological and spiritual quest that endeavours to shed light on who and what we are in relation to the greater cosmic whole from whence we came. Serres and Tesson compellingly posit that "the somatic encounter of the living body in relation to itself and its environment" is laden with philosophical and spiritual value (Johnsen 68). They promulgate a new way of living and being in the world with our "Cul sur la selle, pensées au ciel"1 (Tesson, Petit traité 75) that removes us, at least temporarily, from our "padded cells" (Chare 100) in which we spend nearly every waking moment [End Page 355] in our edifices of brick, wood, concrete, or steel. When we reconnect ourselves to the universe by revitalizing our dulled senses, which entails a removal of the physical and digital barriers standing in the way of experiencing the splendour of the cosmos to which we are directly and inextricably linked, Serres and Tesson maintain that a more biocentric "lecture du monde"2 (Tesson, Petit traité 79) emerges that is paramount to restoring our lost sense of ecological awareness preventing us from taking action in defence of an imperilled planet on the brink of collapse. Brief Contextualization of Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde It is, perhaps, in his essay Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde (2005) that Tesson most clearly articulates his ecocentric, sensualist Weltanschauung and deep-seated anxiety related to anthropogenic climate change. Although many themes appear in this lyrical work, such as the inauthenticity of the postmodern lifestyle, the pervasive disconnect between humanity and the remainder of the cosmos, the perils of excessive urbanization, the nefarious effects of globalization, and the lingering influence of patriarchal oppression around the world, "Tesson's approach is [always] fundamentally anchored in ecological thought and the defense of the environment" (Blum-Reid 40; my insertion). Tesson reveals that his physically gruelling expeditions to some of the most remote places on the planet, where he "has toured the world by bicycle, crossed the Himalayas on foot, followed the route of Gulag escapees walking from Siberia to Calcutta" (Blum-Reid 40) are fuelled by a desire to "établir un rapport plus direct avec la nature"3 ("Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde" n.p.) through his senses. In the same vein as "moine-mendiants, troubadours, voyageurs, hobos ou beatniks"4 (Tesson, Petit traité 15; emphasis in original), Tesson is a quintessential nomad who incessantly flees the postmodern world in search of a more authentic relationship with the rest of the biosphere. He also engages in self-critique all throughout the essay; in numerous passages, he laments that he has sometimes "trahi les principes du fair means"5 (Petit traité 23; emphasis in original). Tesson's concept of "fair means" refers to a kind of slow travel that reinvigorates our numbed senses in addition to offering ample time for reflection. He theorizes that modern forms of transportation such as airplanes, helicopters, cars, and trains place our bodies into...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".