Silence and Art to be Human in a More-Than-Human World: With Michel Serres and Posthumanist Companions

In the context of Michel Serres’ and posthumanism’s proposal of rethinking the human and the world in a perspective of universal co-belonging, silence (of the human word) assumes the function of a catalyst for the recognition of the human body in its aesthetic, cognitive, relational, and hybrid dimensionality, and of the world in its agency (including artistic). Within this framework, the contribution proposes a reading of art as a relation and catalyzer of relations, that is, as a (re)activation of positive relations of the human with a world that reveals itself to be increasingly hyper- complex. Taking Serresian ideas on artistic practices as not(only) human forms of expression and some posthumanist “isomorphic” positions on non-human agency as tools, the research then highlights the more-than-human scope of art.