The audio and slides below were recorded at my talk at Stanford University on January 30, 2020. I had the pleasure of speaking about the late Michel Serres to an audience most of whom had known him personally, some over many years. I presented the approach of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought and suggested why Serres’s thought is important for us today.
Abstract
After a long period of under-appreciation, Michel Serres’s prescient and unique writing is now beginning to receive the attention it has long deserved. This talk explores the distinctiveness and contemporaneity of Serres’s thought, paying particular attention to the “figures” that distinguish not only the themes he addresses, but also the way he approaches and passes between them. What emerges is a picture of a body of work radically distinct from that of his contemporaries Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, and a set of concerns the timeliness of which is only now becoming evident.
