Forthcoming book. Michel Serres: A Critical Introduction

I am pleased and honoured to have recently signed a contract on a critical introduction to Michel Serres for an Anglophone readership. The backstory to Michel Serres: A Critical Introduction is the impression I have long since formed, and that has strengthened over time, of just how fruitfully Serres’ thought intersects with, informs and frequently subtends a whole host of the most important contemporary debates in and around European philosophy, and does so in ways that often remain implicit or unexplored.

The book will be the first comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to Serres in any language, a comprehensiveness which is particularly important given his genuinely cross-disciplinary work which is, despite all the rhetoric around Interdisciplinarity today, still rare in its scope and expertise.

Rather than just offering a general (and unwieldy) introduction to Serres’ titanic corpus, the book will weave together a series of interconnected arguments to demonstrate how is work can shed new light on, generate new possibilities for, and open new ways of thinking in philosophy (primarily post-humanism and object oriented ontology), ecological thought and the environmental and scientific humanities, literary studies, sociology and body studies, anthropology and narratology, as well as in the discourse around Interdisciplinarity itself. The book will show how scholars and students in these areas can learn from both the themes and the shape of Serres’ thinking to advance their own disciplines while also enlarging the concerns of those disciplines beyond their customary frontiers. It is, in part at least, an attempt to make Serres indispensable (or more correctly, to show how he already is indispensable, would we but realise it) to a broad range of the most important questions currently being asked in, and of, European thought.

Many thanks to Carol Macdonald at Edinburgh University Press for her wise guidance of the project thus far.