This is the first of a number of extracts from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought that I will be posting in the run-up to the book’s publication around April 2020. The archive of all the extracts will be accessible here.
Weighing in at 800 pages and around 300 000 words, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques is substantially longer than Derrida’s Of Grammatology (230 000 words) and fractionally longer than Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (290 000). It appeared in 1968,[1] the same fabled year as the student riots in Paris and other French cities that nearly brought down the de Gaulle government, and the same year as the publication Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’, one year after Of Grammatology and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, and two years after Foucault’s The Order of Things. Like Derrida’s and Deleuze’s contemporaneous volumes, Le Système de Leibniz was written as a major doctoral thesis (French doctoral candidates submit a major and a minor thesis), the fruit of research under Serres’ tutor Jean Hyppolite at the École Normale Suprérieure, Rue d’Ulm. It stands both as a rich and sinuous study in its own right and also as a radical declaration of philosophical intent from a thinker who is bringing forth, in nuce, the figures of thought that will accompany him throughout more than five decades of subsequent writing.
Leibniz, like Serres himself, is a dauntingly broad thinker. He is the progenitor of calculus, of the binary notation that underpins modern computing, and of set theory. In physics he is a pioneer of mechanics and in biology he is the first ‘ovo-spermist’, arguing that the embryo results from the interaction of sperm and egg. He is a political transnationalist and a father of Europe, a philologist who writes the Lord’s Prayer in over fifty languages, a historian, legal scholar, chemist and musician: a ‘prototype of the universal spirit’ (LSD) and a thinker of relentless interdisciplinarity who leaves even the best-read scholar of his work exhausted and panting for breath.
It is all the more disappointing for Serres, therefore, that commentators on Leibniz seem intent on singling out and elevating one aspect of his encyclopaedic oeuvre to the status of a control and frame for all the rest, the one indispensable starting point for all Leibniz study, the royal road to finding Leibniz simpliciter or Leibniz degree zero, or a theme in relation to which the rest of the Leibnizian corpus is but a series of variations. Serres laments that each commentator elects a such a single starting point in Leibniz’s vast oeuvre, a choice that determines their reading of that oeuvre in its entirety (SL 26) and that, lo and behold, is later claimed as the one indispensable place from which all true understandings of Leibniz must begin.
Serres holds up for special excoriation Bertrand Russell’s A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz,[2] which ‘posits at the outset a short series of axioms and tries to deduce the system’. For Russell, Leibniz is first and foremost a logician, and the rest of his work must be brought under, and judged by, this controlling truth. When Russell encounters the ‘thousand contradictions’ to this immaculate hypothesis in the complexity of Leibniz’s work, he has no hesitation in laying responsibility for such unfortunate and regrettable lapses ‘at Leibniz’s door’ (SL 26n3), rather than asking whether the problem may not rather lie with his own boutique selection of ‘Leibnizian’ axioms. Would that Leibniz had from the outset been endowed with Russell’s own clarity of vision!
Though Russell is an egregious offender, Serres identifies this propensity to elevate one aspect of the Leibnizian corpus as the controlling paradigm for the whole as a chronic pathology of Leibniz criticism. There is a propensity for each commentator—surprise surprise—to read Leibniz through his or her own disciplinary speciality, subtly (or not quite so subtly) raising their very own area of expertise to the status of the perfect discourse to which all other areas of inquiry must obediently genuflect. This underwhelmingly procrustean approach is mirrored in commentary after predictable commentary, giving us the ‘logicist’ Leibniz, the Leibniz of the ‘knowing subject’, Leibniz the metaphysician of forces, Leibniz the monadic pluralist, Leibniz the theological mystic and universalist, Leibniz the reconciler of theology and law, Leibniz the progenitor of a new historical vision or Leibniz the mathematician, to name but a few (SL 26-7).
This is our first glimpse of a figure of thought against which we shall see Serres battling throughout his oeuvre, and to which we shall frequently return in this and subsequent chapters. Serres will give it multiple names in different texts, but for convenience and consistency of reference we shall call it ‘umbilical thinking’. In Le Système de Leibniz Serres condemns what he calls ‘umbilical disciplines’ that ground and give the irreducible truth of all other discourses. In anatomy the umbilicus is the navel, the fixed, central point through which the foetus is fed. In geometry, it is a now obsolete term describing a focus, or the point on a surface through which all lines of curvature pass. More broadly, both in French and English ‘umbilical’ carries the sense of ‘occupying a central point or position’ (OED). If a discourse or way of thinking is umbilical it claims to be the single, privileged access to plain, unvarnished truth, which all other discourses distort or falsify to one degree or another. What Serres condemns then, is ‘umbilical’ readings of Leibniz, attempting to account for the variety of his work in terms of one fundamental, unifying discourse which acts as a measure for all others. In a religious register, umbilical thinking is an idolatry or a dogmatism that allows for no compromise; in political terms it is a controlling ideology; in economic terms it is a gold standard or dominant currency in relation to which all other values are calculated.[3]
The irony, from Serres’ point of view, is that if all these commentaries are taken together they reconstitute Leibniz’s thought quite well (SL 28). The problem, however, is that every commentator insists that his or her own path through Leibniz’s work is necessary and definitive, that their own pocket of order in the Leibnizian corpus is the ‘total part’ (pars totalis, partie totale), a privileged metonym or model of a universal Leibnizian order (SL 29).[4] Like Armande in Molière’s Les Femmes savantes, each umbilical approach confidently affirms ‘No one will have wit except us or our friends’.[5]
[1] Jean-Marie Auzias cheekily calls the publication of Le Système ‘perhaps the most interesting event of the year’/’peut-être l’événement le plus intéressant de cette année’, Jean-Marie Auzias, Michel Serres, philosophe occitan (Lyon: Fédérop/Jorn, 1992) 15.
[2] Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London: Allen and Unwin, 1900).
[3] I am grateful to David Webb for some of these examples.
[4] For an excellent discussion of the difference between pars pro toto and pars totalis, see Christian Godin, ‘Le tout dans la partie’, Les cahiers de médiologie 9:1 (2000) 179-188.
[5] ‘Nul n’aura de l’esprit, hors nous et nos amis’, Molière, Les Femmes savantes (1672), III, 2.