In Chapter 4 we saw how Malabou in Avant demain opens the door to the possibility of an eco-synaptic account of personhood and selfhood which moves beyond the problematic way in which her earlier work tethers the human to the ‘host substance’ of the brain. Furthermore, Avant demain moves towards a more situated, complex figure of the human being taking into account the various co-written narratives in which each human being is entangled, as well as (and on equal terms with) the synaptic encoding of memories and the allied capacity for recall. This move towards a more situated, ecological notion of the self has the benefit of being able to ‘carry’ human beings who, for one reason or another, fail to measure up to this or that host capacity, and it allows for a more sophisticated notion of identity over time, taking into account factors external as well as internal to the individual psyche. In the present chapter I want to show how Michel Serres offers a more detailed account of the continuity of nature and culture, and a more developed understanding of the role of narrative in building a figure of the human.

Serres has sustained for over three decades a detailed reflection on the nature of humanity, culminating in a tetralogy of as yet untranslated books published between 2001 and 2009 which outline what he calls his new universal humanism and the ‘Great Story’ of the universe. The question ‘what is the human?’ stands at the centre of his work and, he claims, at the centre of twentieth-century thought in general (TH 71). I want to explore his own response to this question in two parts. First, we shall see how he elaborates a fresh approach to the question of determinate capacities that we have been tracing through the previous four chapters of this book. We shall then turn in the second part of the chapter to see how he supplements this reworking of capacities with a narrative identity which, unlike the figures of the human in Badiou, Meillassoux and Malabou, explicitly broadens the scope of his account beyond the human as such to include nonhuman life and, indeed, the whole universe.