This is the audio of a talk I gave at the International Philosophical Seminar (IPS) in June 2022. It begins by showing how Michel Serres rethinks the foundational modern moment of the state of nature, and it then sketches a way of understanding modernity in terms of three recurring moments: a flattening, a division and a hierarchy, showing how Serres’s thought disrupts each of these moments through its motif of parasitism.

Photograph Ⓒ achresis khora, https://www.flickr.com/photos/26774111@N00/