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Michel Serres' Dark Society
Charting the Anthropocene
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Description
Michel Serres' Dark Society is an urgent call to re-examine our dominant social order in a time of tremendous uncertainty and impending catastrophe, examining how social thought might be reoriented for the Anthropocene by engaging seriously with the work of Michel Serres.
Bucking the trend of contemporary social science to treat societal problems as purely dysfunctional and unintended, Steven Brown asks: what if social order is itself a provisional and unstable arrangement? What kind of social science is needed to understand communities living together on borrowed time? Using Michel Serres' concept of entanglement, this rigorous and accessible book brings his ideas into the sphere of the social sciences, exploring sustainable new ways of living together in the Anthropocene. This new 'dark' world is a place of violence, noise and parasites, and swarms of animals – all metaphors that underpin Serres' worldview and create an entirely new vision of volatile, often feral co-habitation.
Situating Serres within contemporary debates in social theory, science and technology studies, and Anthropocene scholarship, Michel Serres' Dark Society offers a non-foundational introduction that resists system-building in favour of interference, translation, and variation. In doing so, it argues that Serres provides not a theory of solutions, but a set of conceptual resources for rethinking what it means to live together amid ecological crisis, technological expansion, and planetary uncertainty.
Table of Contents
2. Social science: how can we feel safe?
3. Violence: cemeteries and necropolitics
4. Parasitism: organizing evil
5. Collectivities: packs, swarms and crowds
6. Out of time: anthropocenic belongings
7. Conclusion
Product details
| Published | Dec 10 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781350437760 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Series | Michel Serres and Material Futures |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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This invaluable and timely study offers a rigorous yet accessible, transdisciplinary engagement with Michel Serres, illuminating his relevance for the Anthropocene-Capitalocene. By bridging philosophy and the social sciences, Brown delivers an innovative, compelling analysis that will reshape contemporary debates and inspire scholars across multiple fields.
Keith Moser, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Mississippi State University, USA
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Steve Brown, known as the leading figure in social theory inspired by Michel Serres, now explicates this unconventional philosopher's implication for social theory facing the changing world of the Anthropocene. While the Anthropocene has made evidently visible the violent ties between our life and the changing Earth System and decaying biosphere, Brown elucidates how Serres's dark social theory sheds light on our non-innocent way to live (and die) together with human and nonhuman others.
Atsuro Morita, Professor of Science, Technology and Culture, Osaka University, Japan
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Brown offers a compelling, inventive and highly perceptive reading of Michel Serres for the social sciences. This will be a key text for anyone interested in understanding questions of the social in new ways and conceptualizing how we might live together.
Tim Barker, Professor of Media Technology and Aesthetics, University of Glasgow, UK

























