"Thesis is the action of putting something in a place. What is important is the place, and only then the manner of occupying it. Of taking it, holding it, setting oneself up there. Setting one’s foot on it. The foot, here, is the trace of a thesis, and the wall of colors, the noise, is at once battle and racket, the two strategies – material and logicial, hardware and software – of taking place and getting a foot in the door. (Serres 1995b, 53)
This is why, for Serres ‘[t]he form of the squabble is stable and perennial’ (Serres 1995b, 80), and why ‘[f]ury is a classifier’ (Serres 1995b, 82). It is also why Serres has so repeatedly found ways to praise the ceding of place or stepping aside from place-taking:
The blank place is the place of the continuous cession. There is no blank white place, there are only the blank white ones who step aside. There is no blank place, there is only a blank step, the step of giving up a place, there is only the trace of a step, that white foot, exquisite, alive, in the midst of the noise. (Serres 1995b, 78)." [Steven Connor, Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft]
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