Why Michel Serres? A Personal Reflection

I woke this morning to the news that Michel Serres, philosopher, mountaineer, broadcaster, grandfather, historian of science, lover of rugby, mathematician, and inimitable writer, has passed away at the age of 88. This sad news comes at a moment when I am deeply immersed in Serres’ writing, putting the finishing touches to a monograph on his work. Throughout today I have found myself reflecting on the fascination that Serres has held for me ever since my first, felicitous encounter with his writing.

I had never written a full-length academic monograph on a single thinker before I decided to embark on Michel Serres: Figures of Thought. I may never do so again. So what led me to spend four years of my life with my head buried in the writing of a thinker who had never featured in a course I have taken, whose books had never been recommended to me, and whom I never met? This post is my attempt to answer those questions for myself.

My first engagement with Serres’ writing came as I was researching French Philosophy Today, my book on the figure of the human in contemporary French thought. I came to him through reading Bruno Latour, which is to say that I came to Serres late. Time was that those familiar with Latour’s work would, likely as not, become aware of him through his intellectual friendship with Serres. The tables have now decisively turned, and if you are familiar with Serres there is a good chance that you came to him through the gateway of Latour.

 

The Great Story

What drew me to Serres in those early days was his account of the ‘Great Story’ of the universe branching from the Big Bang to the present day and beyond. It is significant that Serres does not encompass his thought with one or more fundamental concepts (such as ‘being’, ‘immanence’ or the ‘event’), but with a story. This is an inevitable consequence of his determination to dispense with meta-discourse. His preference for story as a frame for his thought is in part a reaction against the sort of philosophy that thinks only in substantives and infinitives—‘to be and to have, consciousness, nothingness, thought, will… nouns that are not declined, infinitives that are not conjugated’ (Pan 93)[1]—and that throws all other language in the bin (Pan 95; see also TI 226/TK 149). These nouns are the ‘statues’ and ‘fetishes’ of philosophy (Ec 163/C 110), causing it to speak a telegraphic language— ‘Me arrive tomorrow’, ‘Me be ego’, ‘Being and nothingness’—that Serres likens to playing the piano while wearing boxing gloves (Pan 94).[2] He takes narrative out of an anthropocentric framework in a way that is neither speculative nor arbitrary, enchanting the universe not through fanciful myth but through information theory and fluid dynamics.[3]

 

Style

Although I did not yet understand the pull that Serres’ thought was to have on me, in those early days I quickly warmed to his style and to particular details of his biography. While his writing is complex, rich and demanding, its rigour comes not from the deadening fog of multisyllabic philosophical jargon that obscures much theoretical discourse, but from a desire for precision in the everyday. When Bruno Latour challenges Serres that his style is ‘considered difficult, elusive’, he replies that ‘I remain as much as possible in everyday language—I simply use it in all its amplitude’ (Ec 41/C 24).[4] What he means is quite straightforward. When he writes about sailing or woodwork, he uses the everyday vocabulary of the seaman and the carpenter, which to the rest of us may appear affected and forbidding: ‘The average reader may complain that he has to look things up in the dictionary, but the sailor and the carpenter will rejoice that they are respected’ (Ec 138/C 92).[5] If our own area of expertise is misrepresented or improperly discussed we think it ignorance; if another’s area of expertise is properly discussed we are all too quick to dismiss it as obscurantism or affectation.

From the beginning I was drawn to a lack of grand posturing in Serres’s style. Hand in hand with his embrace of precise, everyday language is an antipathy to metalanguage. The terms that recur in his writing—the parasite, noise, translation, Hermes—have not ossified into the sort of signature concepts that attach themselves to other philosophers, such as ‘Epicurus’s clinamen, Descartes’ piece of wax, Rousseau’s general will, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, Derrida’s deconstruction, René Girard’s mimetism, etc.’ (Pan 360).[6] Serres is quick to dismiss such signature concepts, arguing that ‘I have no logo, no brand’ (Pan 30)[7] and ‘I avoid metalanguage, because usually it is only used for advertising. What’s the point of saying, “I just did this or that”? If one really does it, it’s obvious’ (Ec 136/C 91, translation altered).[8] Serres’ approach is also blessedly free of the self-aggrandizing periodisation that blights the thought of those who ‘divide everything into “before me, and then after my works”’, engaging in a ‘self-promoting mania’ that, once more, belongs, if anywhere, in the world of advertising (Ec 211/C 145).

 

Costly conviction

My fascination with Serres’s thought was further strengthened by the way in which all of life can be found on the pages of his books, and all of Serres’s own life is implicated in his philosophical commitments. Here is an author who can write affectionately about the relationship between a grandfather and a grand-daughter, and an academic who can remain sober in a crowd intoxicated by scholastic one-upmanship or theoretical partisanship. Here is an intellectual who feels more at home with sailors, labourers and farmers than fellow intellectuals: ‘When I got married, for example, I invited all the workers from the family firm’ (Pan 58).[9] Here is a writer who stands by his convictions even when they are unpopular in his immediate milieu, and even when they come at a personal cost, who resigned his post in the French Navy over the military use of atomic weapons, and who struggled for many years to find a post in a philosophy department because of his unconventional refusal to market himself as a serial expositor of canonical thinkers. Serres warns his readers never to trust clean-handed critics, for unlike Diogenes ‘they have abandoned neither coat, nor money, nor petty power nor their mediocre glory’ (OG 216/G 115; see also D 65-6).[10] He is not among that number; his choices and his convictions have not come cheaply.

 

Willingness to be unfashionable

Here is an academic unfashionably sceptical of the May 1968 student riots. Finding himself chair of the États généraux de l’Université (a national conference convened at the height of the events of ’68 to rethink the institution of higher education in France) Serres employs a reflexive verb to remark how ‘I found myself presiding over the sitting’, and quips that ‘there I was, the boss! I had a lot of fun. But I never belonged to any group’ (Pan 57),[11] concluding that it was ‘the only time I entered into politics, really’ (Pan 57).[12] Le Système de Leibniz struck an optimistic and only subtly political note at the height of the politically charged events of 1968. Its gradualist and optimistic pronouncements such as ‘the more we advance in knowledge, the more we discover with joy a better world: in fact, the more we constitute it as such’ (SL 389)[13] were never likely to find an eager audience among militant revolutionary intellectuals.

In an age of politicised philosophy, from Sartre’s ‘engagement’ through the Marxisms of the ’68 generation and beyond, here is a thinker who rarely displays the sword-wielding, tub-thumping agonistics that characterise the ambient critical tribalism, and who abhors the political engagement common among his peers. ‘For me’, he warns in Solitude, ‘political decisions were synonymous with mass deaths’ (Sol 119),[14] and his politics are formed more by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki than by the events of ’68. Whether or not his readers share this view, this equation of grand politics with mass slaughter does make sense of his reluctance to wade into political debates all guns blazing.

 

Hermeneutics of suspicion, hermeneutics of federation

Serres is antipathetic to the method of critique characteristic of the human sciences, and in particular to the culture of critique and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’[15] that dominated the intellectual landscape in France in the latter decades of the twentieth century and still exerts a powerful influence on academic method today. Critique is consumed in judging the work of others (Her 60), and within the university system the method of critique produces stadiums full of referees ready to blow the whistle at the slightest infringement, while the pitch remains empty of players (Ec 198/C 136). The practitioners of academic critique are priests of knowledge, pronouncing ex cathedra on orthodoxy and heterodoxy, or pathologically suspicious police officers who are always tracking and questioning anyone they see (PT 32; R 33/Rom 31).

Serres’ own approach is no less incisive than the method of critique and suspicion, but it achieves its aims in a very different way. He opposes not by attacking, but by generalising. Witness this example from his early work on Leibniz: Rather than relocating the fixed point from one celestial object to another, Serres commends the Leibnizian approach of not negating Copernicus’s Revolution but generalising it to infinity ‘in order to discover that everything is centre in its way’, yielding ‘a world infinitely centered-decentered’ in a system which Serres describes as Ptolemaic-Copernican (SL 634).[16] Everywhere is an ‘earth-sun’, variable and unvarying, moving and fixed, distinct and confused.

If there is a regular antagonist in Serres’ writing it is Descartes, but he is no straightforward enemy. In Le Système de Leibniz Serres argues that ‘Leibniz crowns and completes the Cartesian method in refusing its requisites’ (SL 232),[17] taking what is ostensibly a universal principle and resituating it as one premise among many. In Serres’ own dense and lapidary formula, Leibniz’s attitude to Descartes’ system is that ‘he is opposed to it or generalises it’ (SL 23-4).[18] To oppose by negation is to deny what was affirmed, but to oppose by generalisation is to show that what was affirmed is one instance of a broader reality it does not contain, like Kepler’s rejection of Ptolemy’s circles in favour of conic sections. Opposing by generalising federates the local ever more comprehensively as it inches asymptotically towards the universal. It is a mode of engagement that does not critique or deconstruct, but that nevertheless ends by destabilising. In conversation with Bruno Latour Serres implores ‘I consider exclusion as the blackest action of history, and even of humanity. No, let us not eliminate; on the contrary, let us include’ (Ec 194/C 132; translation altered),[19] and In Rome he affirms that ‘I believe it’s possible to think without excluding’ (R 104/Ro 67).[20] Opposing by generalising shows that it is also possible to critique and subvert without excluding, without a negative moment. Opposing by generalising is one of Serres’ distinctive ‘figures of thought’ around which the argument of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought is structured.

 

Genuine cross-disciplinarity

With qualifications in both mathematics and philosophy, Serres is that rarest of beasts: a genuinely cross-disciplinary thinker. In an academic climate where crowd-pleasing gestures of interdisciplinarity are all the rage, Serres’ thought is built from the bottom up on irreducibly and necessarily encyclopaedic foundations. Yes, he has written books on Lucretius and thermodynamics, and on Zola and the steam engine, but these are only the visible tips of the cross-disciplinary iceberg of Serresian thought.

To read Serres is to find oneself, sooner or later, on the outside: the mathematician finds herself an outsider to nineteenth century literature, if not to recent trends in biology. The literary scholar finds himself on unfamiliar territory with Serres’ use of the technical vocabulary of sailing, or mathematical topology. This is only a reason to avoid Serres if we demand to dominate our reading matter and then pontificate as experts at the feet of whom all others are forced to sit. To read Serres is not to master Serres, and that is a good thing. We can hear the tone of frustration in Bruno Latour’s question ‘why in the space of one paragraph, do we find ourselves with the Romans then with Jules Verne then with Indo-Europeans, then, suddenly, launched with the Challenger rocket, before ending up on the bank of the Garonne river?’ (Ec 70/C 43).[21] To read Serres is to be adrift on at least some of the vast ocean of knowledge, barely even aware of our ignorance, to be confronted with disciplines which, whatever our speciality, we last studied at school, and this can perhaps be a discomforting experience for those driven by a critical instinct to prove themselves right and everyone else wrong.

Serres regularly confounds his readers with an ‘unpocketability’ and ‘undockability’[22] that wriggles free of all attempts to cloister it. Whereas many theoretical treatises take a central theme and scrutinise it centripetally from a number of different angles, Serres’ books radiate out in lavishly centrifugal diffusions, crossing disciplinary boundaries at will. As Steven Connor points out, it is precisely because Serres does not let his reader settle into a familiar thematic patter that his work ‘constitutes a thesaurus of possibilities that is much richer than that of other writers who may appear more tractable to our purposes’.[23]

Not long into the project of writing a book on Serres’ thought I started keeping a list of all topics, writers and figures with which he engaged and with which I would have to familiarise myself. It soon became clear that this expanding catalogue of knowledge would confound even an intellect of Goethean breadth, and it stands as eloquent testimony to the unparalleled range of Serres’s thought. I reproduce it here in all its centrifugal, incomplete, federating, algorithmically structured proliferation:

Abstraction; Agriculture; Algorithm; Alterity; Andromaque; Angels; Animals; Apeiron; Aphrodite; Ariadne ; Aristotle; Arts, the; Atlas; Baal; Babel; Bachelard, Gaston; Bacon, Francis; Badiou, Alain; Balzac, Honoré de; Barthes, Roland; Baudrillard, Jean; Belle noiseuse; Belonging and identity; Bergson, Henri; Biosemiotics; biotechnology; Black box; Blanc (white/blank); Body, the; Bourbaki; Bouveresse, Jacques; Branches; Bridges; Cacography; Calendar, the; Canguilhem, Georges; Capital; Carnot, Sadi; Carpaccio, Vittore; Cartesian space; Castafiore, Bianca; Challenger shuttle; Chaos; Character-concepts; Chirality; Circumstance; City and country; Classical age, the; Clinamen; Communication; Complexity; Comte, Auguste; Corneille, Pierre; Crimes against humanity; Critical philosophy; Culture; Death; Deleuze, Gilles; Derrida, Jacques; Descartes, René; Difference (philosophy of); Diogenes and Alexander; Dom Juan; Dough; Dualism; Dumézil, Georges; Ecology; Education; Encyclopedia; Enlightenment; Evolution; Exchange value; Excluded third; Excluding exclusion; Exo-Darwinism; Fetish; Fluid dynamics; Fly, the; Foucault, Michel; French language; Gender; Geometry; Girard, René; Gironde; God; Great Story, the; Hard and soft; Harlequin and Pierrot; Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm; Heidegger, Martin; Hercules; Hergé; Hermaphrodite; Hermeneutics; Hermes; Hestia; Hiroshima; Horace; Ichnography; Identity and belonging; Inclination and declination; Information and information theory; Interdisciplinarity; Interference; Internet; Invention; Joker; Jupiter; Labyrinth; La Fontaine, Jean de; Laminar flow; Landscape; Language; Laplace, Pierre-Simon; Latour, Bruno; Left handedness; Legend; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; Linguistic philosophy; Literature; Local and global; Loganalysis; Lucretius; Malabou, Catherine; Maps; Mars; Marx, Karl; Mary (Mother of Jesus); Materialism; Mathematics; Maupassant, Guy de; Media; Meillassoux, Quentin; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Models and structures; Monad; Money; Monod, Jacques; Montaigne, Michel de; Music; Myth; Nancy, Jean-Luc; Narrative; Natural contract, the; Nature and culture; New Materialism; Noise; North-West Passage; Object oriented thought; Objects; Object-world; Œdipus; Ontology; Opposing by generalising; Orpheus and Eurydice; Pagus; Pantope; Pascal, Blaise; Pentecost; Percolation; Phenomenology; Pierrot; Plato; Pluralism; Posthumanism; Postmodernism; Prefix: from pre- to pan-; Prepositions; Procedural thought; Production (age of); Prometheus; Quasi-object, the; Quasi-subject, the; Quirinus; Rambling; Rancière, Jacques; Religion; Rome; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Sacred and secular thought; Sacrifice; Sailing; Saint Denis; Saint Paul; Sarrasine; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Scapegoat, the ; Science; Set theory; Sisyphus; Society of the Spectacle; Socrates; Sokal, Alan; Space; Spinning top; Sport; Static; Statues; Steam engine; Structuralism; Subject and object; Tarpeia; Textiles; Thanatocracy; Theology; Thermodynamics; Third, the; Thumbelina; Time; Topology; Translation; Truth; Turbulence; Turner, Joseph Mallord William; Ulysses; Umbilical thinking; Universal, the; Use value; Utopia and utopianism; Venus and Mars; Verne, Jules; Violence; War; Weather and climate; Web, the; Weil, Simone; Wikipedia; World-object; Zeno of Elea; Zola, Émile.

 

A global intuition

Early in my philosophical journey I encountered a passage by Paul Ricoeur that has regularly returned to me as a yardstick for evaluating a body of philosophical work. Ricœur argues that ‘all great philosophies […] are de omni re scibili, about everything knowable, but each in accordance with the unique perspective of its thetic act and of the strategy it selects to continue the positing act’.[24] Plato can be my memory, my culture, my language. As can Marx, as can the Bible, and as can Shakespeare. Each of these can be adequate to everything. Every great philosophy, as well as all great literature, is about everything knowable.

Serres has a similar notion that he calls a ‘global intuition’, but it stretches beyond the knowable to body forth a ‘new way of being in the world’[25] or ‘a different style of thinking and writing—style as a method of seeing and understanding things’.[26] Serresian global intuition is a way not merely of thinking but of living, behaving, feeling, desiring and moving in the world, of resonating with the way the world is and the way it is changing; it is a compelling feature of his writing that drew me to him and keeps me fascinated with him. Similarly to Deleuze’s, Serres’ global intuition is particularly vividly drawn and particularly successful in convincing the reader to walk a mile in Serres’ shoes. In the course of a conversation with Bruno Latour he explains that ‘my goal is not above all to be right but, rather, to produce a global intuition, profound and sensible’ (Ec 170/C 115).[27] Serres is seeking to produce not a set of propositions or a system, but a life.

Serresian intuition strikes the ‘first blows’ of the creative process in the arts and the inventive process in the sciences; it generates the initial hypothesis that is to be tested, or the initial way of seeing the world that is to be explored. Like Nietzsche’s eternal return (see LRE), an intuition is not something that can exhaustively be explained, because it explains everything else. It need not be instantaneous, but ‘ertain great inventors confess to having received their definitive intuition in a single night, a week, a wonderful year’ (In 99/Inc 52).[28] Intuition is also distinct from understanding. For example we can come to an understanding of the vast duration of time since the Big Bang without intuiting it (In 190/Inc 105). An intuition is in an important sense pre-rational, but it is not anti-rational or arbitrary. Indeed, new intuitions can be demanded by new circumstances, such as the development of non-Euclidean geometry requiring us to understand the world differently (see Rome).

Serresian intuition is also ‘profound and sensible’. Intuition is not exclusively intellectual but ‘[w]hatever the activity you’re involved in, the body remains the medium of intuition, memory, knowing, working and above all invention’ (VSC 31-2/VB 34).[29] Intuition is corporeal: not a concept but a sensibility, and not only a way of thinking but a way of living in the world. It is also profound and sensible in the sense that it maintains a pre-theoretical sensitivity to what Serres calls the rhythms and sounds of existence out of which emerge meaning and language. The corporeality and pre-theoretical, pre-linguistic rhythmicality of Serresian global intuition sets it apart from the intellectualising notion of ‘worldview’ and also from Deleuze’s concept of the ‘image of thought’ in Difference and Repetition and elsewhere which, though similarly global in scope, is primarily concerned with questions of reference, truth and representation.[30]

 

Invention

I find a rare freshness and a risky experimentation in Serres’ thought. The refrain that ‘to think is to invent’ echoes throughout his work.[31] It is by bringing disparate disciplinary approaches into federating, isomorphic relations that Serres can make them ‘vibrate through synthesis, ambiguity, paradox, or the undecidable’ (NP 200/BOP 75, translation altered)[32] causing us to see them differently. The relations instantiated and explored in Serres’ writing are themselves creative and generative of new ideas, such as the juxtaposition of law and nature in The Natural Contract which produces a new paradigm for understanding the relation between human beings and the rest of the natural world. The parasite invents (P 50/Par 35); the clinamen invents through ‘conjunctive turbulence’ (NP 170/BOP 137, translation altered); evolution invents (GB 178) and the Great Story invents (GB 117). Similarly, Serres understands philosophy as the invention of characters and concepts.

 

Ahead of his time

While others were noisily making news, Serres repeatedly anticipated some of the major trends of recent thought and society. In The Five Senses (1985) he was writing against the linguistic paradigm at the very moment when the linguistic turn in French thought was reaching its most paroxystic intensity, maintaining that ‘I fear those who go through life drugged, less than I fear those under the edict of language’ (CS 98/FS 92),[33] and long before the appearance of the ‘new materialist’ and ‘object oriented’ movements that claim him as an influence. The Natural Contract, pleading for a renewed environmental responsibility and restraint on corporate destruction of the environment, hit the shelves one year after the stock market crash of 1989 and at the beginning of the early 1990s recession in France and the U.S.A., when the appetite for potentially economically harmful ecological arguments was at a low ebb.

At the heyday of Althusserian hegemony at the École Normale Supérieure, Rue d’Ulm he questioned the Marxist orthodoxy of the primacy of production, convinced that the age dominated by the production of physical goods from raw materials was being eclipsed by one characterised by communication and information transfer. From our vantage point as cross-platform media-consuming internet users, we might concede that he has a point. However, when he dared to suggest to the highly influential ENS tutor and Marx scholar Louis Althusser that the age of production was soon to be overtaken by that of communication, he was denounced as a fascist (Pan 124). It is his scepticism about the paradigm of production that also accounts for Serres’ lifelong refusal of communism, even when the affiliation was almost universal at the ENS (Pan 126). Like Nietzsche’s madman, Serres repeatedly came too early.

As far as I can plum the depths of my own motivations, these are the factors that first drew me to Serres’s thought, that held me in its orbit, and that then stoked my determination to write a book on it, however foolhardy that may in retrospect seem. As I write these lines I have just finished giving a series of lectures on Michel Serres and film. The exercise has re-affirmed for me the richness and fecundity of Serres’ thought, and how we are only now beginning to scratch the surface of how his writing can challenge and develop disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Given Serres’ own deep humanity and care for individuals, especially those overlooked in our performance-driven social and professional hierarchies, it is both a comfort and an inspiration to know that, even if he is no longer able to witness it for himself, his writing is now beginning to attract the level of attention it has long deserved.

 

 

Abbreviations

BOP          The Birth of Physics

C                Conversations on Science, Culture and Time

Ec               Éclaircissements

GB             Le Gaucher boiteux

Her            L’Hermaphrodite

In               L’Incandescent

Inc             The Incandescent

LRE            Le retour éternel

NP             La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce

P                Le Parasite

Pan           Pantopie: de Hermès à Petite Poucette

Par            The Parasite

PT              ‘Panoptic Theory’

R                Rome : le livre des fondations

Ro              Rome: The First Book of Foundations

SL               Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques

Sol             Solitude

T                 Thumbelina

TI               Le Tiers-instruit

TK              The Troubadour of Knowledge

VB             Variations on the Body

VSC           Variations sur le corps

 

[1] ‘l’être et l’avoir, la conscience, le néant, la pensée, la volonté… Des substantifs qui ne se déclinent pas, des infinitifs qui ne se conjuguent pas’.

[2] ‘«Moi arriver demain», «Moi être ego », « Être et néant »’. The boxing glove image serves a double purpose. As well as being hopelessly undifferentiated, boxing gloves are a fitting image of the pugilistic disposition of [Cartesian] thought.

[3] I discuss these themes at greater length in ‘Michel Serres’ great story: from biosemiotics to econarratology’, Sub-Stance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, 44:3 (2015) 171-187.

[4] ‘- Mais votre style est considéré comme difficile, comme exclusif.

– Je reste pourtant, autant que je le peux, dans le langage courant, mais je l’utilise dans son ampleur’.

[5] ‘le lecteur moyen se plaindra peut-être d’avoir à chercher dans le dictionnaire, mais le marin et le charpentier se réjouiront qu’on les respecte’. Serres privileges the precise vocabulary of manual and artisanal pursuits as these provide a clearer and more immediate connection with bodily and material reality outside language. The precise language of the lawyer, the medic or—heaven forfend—the philosopher are not accorded similar treatment.

[6] ‘le clinamen d’Épicure, le morceau de cire de Descartes, la volonté générale de Rousseau, la chair de Merleau-Ponty, la déconstruction de Derrida, le mimétisme de René Girard, etc.’

[7] ‘Je n’ai pas de logo, pas de marque’.

[8] ‘j’évite le métalangage, parce que, le plus souvent, il sert seulement de publicité ; à quoi bon dire : je viens de faire ceci ou cela ? Si on le fait vraiment, cela se voit de soi.’.

[9] ‘Quand je me suis marié, par exemple, j’ai invité tous les ouvriers de l’entreprise familiale’.

[10] ‘ils n’ont laissé ni manteau, ni argent, ni petit pouvoir ni leur gloire médiocre’.

[11] ‘je me suis retrouvé président de séance. […] C’était moi le patron ! Je me suis bien amusé. Mais je n’ai jamais appartenu à un groupe quelconque’.

[12] ‘la seule fois où je suis entré en politique, vraiment’.

[13] ‘plus nous avançons dans les connaissances plus nous découvrons avec joie un monde meilleur : en effet, plus nous le constituons comme tel’.

[14] ‘pour moi, les décisions politiques étaient synonymes de morts en masse.’

[15] The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is a term coined by Paul Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy to describe a disposition common to the philosophies of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. All three ‘begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering’ (see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) 34.

[16] ‘Il suffit alors de généraliser cette loi à l’infini pour découvrir que tout est centre dans son genre, et centre de centres dans un genre supérieur […] Planifiant un monde infiniment centré-décentré, Leibniz fait système ptolémaïque et copernicien’.

[17] ‘Leibniz couronne et accomplit la méthode cartésienne en refusant ses réquisits’.

[18] ‘il s’y oppose ou le généralise’.

[19] ‘L’exclusion me paraît l’acte le plus noir de l’histoire et même de l’hominité. Non, n’éliminons pas, bien au contraire, incluons’.

[20] ‘Je crois qu’il est possible de penser sans exclure’.

[21] ‘Pourquoi, au détour d’un paragraphe, se trouve-t-on chez les Romains, puis chez Jules Verne, puis chez les Indo-Européens et, hop ! embarqué dans la fusée Challenger, avant de finir sur une rive de la Garonne ?’

[22] Steven Connor, ‘The Hard and the Soft’, a talk given at the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York, 26 November 2009. Available at http://www.stevenconnor.com/hardsoft/

[23] Connor, ‘The Hard and the Soft’.

[24] Paul Ricœur, ‘Irrationality and the Plurality of Philosophical Systems’, Dialectica 39:4 (1985) 309.

[25] Keith Moser, The Encyclopedic Philosophy of Michel Serres: Writing the Modern World and Anticipating the Future (Augusta, GA: Anaphoral Literary Press, 2016) 244.

[26] Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Celebrating a Master: Michel Serres’, Configurations 8:2 (2000) 165-169, 166.

[27] ‘Vous me direz, à juste titre, qu’Aristote ne justifie rien et ne constitue pas un argument ; et je vous répondrai que mon but n’est pas d’avoir raison à toute force, mais de produire une intuition globale, profonde et sensée.’

[28] ‘Certains grands inventeurs confessent avoir reçu leur intuition définitive en une seule nuit, une semaine, une année admirable’.

[29] ‘[q]uelque activité à laquelle on se livre, le corps demeure le support de l’intuition, de la mémoire, du savoir, du travail et surtout de l’invention’.

[30] Deleuze’s image of thought has distant affinities with what we call a ‘worldview’, but it is less about what we believe than how we believe everything we believe. It is not a list of doctrines but a set of assumptions about how knowledge works and what counts as ‘truth’. It is our image of thought that ‘determines our goals when we try to think’ (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001) xvi), and that gives us a reason to think in the first place. Our image of thought is ‘implicit, subjective, and preconceptual’ (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 61); it encompasses our commitments that are so basic we do not even consider them commitments but simply ‘the way things are’ or ‘common sense’. An image of thought therefore precedes and grounds thought as the ‘prolegomena to philosophy’ (Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 149). Deleuze does not stress the corporeality or the naturalness of an image of thought, as do Serres’s global intuition and figures of thought.

[31] Thought and invention often occur together in lists in Serres’s work, and the theme of invention subtends his oeuvre as a whole. Thought and invention are explicitly identified as synonymous in Le Gaucher boiteux, where ‘thought is invention’ provides the leitmotif of the book. The link is also made explicitly in Corps (11) and Pantopie (35) .

[32] ‘vibrer par la synthèse, l’ambiguïté, le paradoxe ou l’indécidable’.

[33] ‘Je crains moins ceux qui vivent sous drogue que ceux qui marchent sous langue.’