I recently received an email from someone wanting to get into Michel Serres’s writing in English translation, and asking where to start. Here are some thoughts, to which I hope to add over time. The suggestions of primary and secondary material below are not meant tobe exhaustive, but to provide a jumping off point for people coming to Serres’s work for the first time, or wanting to dive deeper into his thought. If you think I’ve missed anything important, drop me an email or post a comment below.

 

Summary. Where should I start?

 

If you want five key publications that will give you as near as possible the full “Serres package” in English translation, here’s what I would read: 1) Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, 2) The Birth of Physics, 3) The Parasite, 4) The Five Senses, 5) The Natural Contract.

 

Books by Serres in English, with publishers’ abstracts

From the Hermes Series

Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy

Essays discuss Molière, La Fontaine, Zola, Plato, Thales, the origin of language, genetics, and geometry.

The Foundations series

Rome 

Michel Serres first book in his ‘foundations trilogy’ is all about beginnings. The beginning of Rome but also about the beginning of society, knowledge and culture. Rome is an examination of the very foundations upon which contemporary society has been built.
With characteristic breadth and lyricism, Serres leads the reader on a journey from a meditation the roots of scientific knowledge to set theory and aesthetics. He explores the themes of violence, murder, sacrifice and hospitality in order to urge us to avoid the repetitive violence of founding. Rome also provides an alternative and creative reading of Livy’s Ab urbe condita which sheds light on the problems of history, repetition and imitation.
First published in English in 1991, re-translated and introduced in this new edition, Michel Serres’ Rome is a contemporary classic which shows us how we came to live the way we do.

Geometry 

In this third installment of his classic ‘Foundations’ trilogy, Michel Serres takes on the history of geometry and mathematics. Even more broadly, Geometry is the beginnings of things and also how these beginnings have shaped how we continue to think philosophically and critically. Serres rejects a traditional history of mathematics which unfolds in a linear manner, and argues for the need to delve into the past of maths and identify a series of ruptures which can help shed light on how this discipline has developed and how, in turn, the way we think has been shaped and formed.
This meticulous and lyrical translation marks the first ever English translation of this key text in the history of ideas.

Statues

In this first English translation of one of his most important works, Michel Serres presents the statue as more than a static entity: for Serres it is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Serres demonstrates how sacrificial art founded and still persists in society and reflects on the centrality of death and the statufied dead body to the human condition.
Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986; from Baal, the paintings of Carpaccio, and the Eiffel Tower, to Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, the Challenger disaster and the literature of Maupassant, La Fontaine and Jules Verne. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, Statues plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways.
Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, Statues contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.

From the Humanism series

Branches 

A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent

Hominescence 

According to Michel Serres, a process of ‘hominescence’ has taken place throughout human history. Hominescence can be described as a type of adolescence; humanity in a state of growing, a state of constant change, on the threshold of something unpredictable. We are destined never to be the same again but what does the future hold?
In this innovative and passionately original work of philosophy, Serres describes the future of man as an adolescence, transitioning from childhood to adulthood, or luminescence, when a dark body becomes light. After considering the radical changes that humanity has experienced over the last fifty years, Serres analyzes the new relationship that man has with diverse concepts, like the dead, his own body, agriculture, and new communication networks. He alerts us to the consequences of these changes, particularly on the danger of growing inequalities between rich and poor countries.
Should we rejoice in the future, ignore it, or even dread it? Unlike other philosophies that preach doom and gloom, Hominescence calls for us to anticipate the uncertain light of the future.

The Incandescent 

The first translation of the volumes in Michel Serres’ classic ‘Humanism’ tetralogy, this ambitious philosophical narrative explores what it means to be human. With his characteristic breadth of references including art, poetry, science, philosophy and literature, Serres paints a new picture of what it might mean to live meaningfully in contemporary society. He tells the story of humankind (from the beginning of time to the present moment) in an attempt to affirm his overriding thesis that humans and nature have always been part of the same ongoing and unfolding history.
This crucial piece of posthumanist philosophical writing has never before been released in English. A masterful translation by Randolph Burks ensures the poetry and wisdom of Serres writing is preserved and his notion of what humanity is and might be is opened up to new audiences.

Other books by Serres in English translation

Angels: A Modern Myth

In this new work Michel Serres, France’s foremost philosopher of science, explores how traditional images of angels in art and legend foretell the preoccupations of modern life. Divided, as between Heaven and Hell, into First and Third Worlds, our societies search for ways to make contact, both by means of the most basic interpersonal relations and high-tech communications. The role of the messenger, Serres argues, is as important now as it was in Biblical times, perhaps more, and yet we lack a philosophy which can explain this role – a philosophy of movement, of communication. Angels: A Modern Myth offers such a philosophy, showing how angels as message-bearers are still part of our modern world, our means of bringing together and understanding science, law, and religion, and perhaps also the means of satisfying our need for reason, justice, and consolation. Abundantly illustrated with an astounding breadth of images ranging from Renaissance paintings to film stills, satellite photographs, computer microchips, and medical microscopy, this thought-provoking book addresses some of the most crucial issues of our time and will make essential reading for anyone seeking to comprehend the new phase of human development engendered by the transformation of our world by information technology.

Biogea

Biogea is a mixture of poetry, philosophy, science, and biography exemplary of the style that has made Michel Serres one of the most extraordinary thinkers of his age. His philosophical and poetic inquiry sings in praise of earth and life, what he names singularly as Biogea.

Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (with Bruno Latour)

Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick—a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays.
Serres begins by discussing the intellectual context and historical events—including the impact of World War II and Hiroshima, which for him marked the beginning of science’s ascendancy over the humanities—that shaped his own philosophical outlook and led him to his lifelong mission of bringing together the texts of the humanities and the conceptual revolutions of modern science. He then confronts the major difficulties encountered by his readers: his methodology, his mathematician’s fondness for “shortcuts” in argument, and his criteria for juxtaposing disparate elements from different epochs and cultures in extraordinary combinations. Finally, he discusses his ethic for the modern age—a time when scientific advances have replaced the natural necessities of disease and disaster with humankind’s frightening new responsibility for vital things formerly beyond its control.
In the course of these conversations Serres revisits and illuminates many of his themes: the chaotic nature of knowledge, the need for connections between science and the humanities, the futility of traditional criticism, and what he calls his “philosophy of prepositions”—an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions. For readers familiar with Serres’s works as well as for the uninitiated, Michel Serres has taught at Clermont-Ferrand, at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) and at the Sorbonne. He has served as visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University and has been on the faculty of Stanford University since 1984. Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is Professor of Sociology, L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris. He has written several books and numerous articles on the ties between the sciences and the rest of culture and society.

Detachment

Eyes

Eyes pioneers a radical philosophy that interrogates ways of seeing, thinking and knowing. In this exploratory text, Michel Serres explores the capacities of eyes: how do we see? What is seeing, or being seen? Can we imagine the sight of non-human eyes, and how does this change our perception of the world and ourselves?
Produced in full colour, this visually stunning work creatively interweaves the writing with the images themselves resulting in a truly philosophical art book. In short poetic texts, Michel Serres invites us to enter rather than to leave Plato’s cave: in this space the visionary philosopher comes into his own, in the half-light of a ‘universe studded with eyes’.

Genesis

This English translation of Michel Serres’ 1982 book Genèse captures in lucid prose the startling breadth and depth of his thinking, as he probes the relations between order, disorder, knowledge, anxiety, and violence. Written in a unique blend of scientific discourse and lyrical outburst, classical philosophical idiom and conversational intimacy, by turns angry, playful, refined or discordant, Genesis is an attempt to think outside of metaphysical categories of unity or rational order and to make us hear–through both its content and form–the “noise,” the “sound and the fury,” that are the background of life and thought.

Serres draws on a vast knowledge of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, classical history, music, theology, art history, information theory, physics, biology, dance and athletics, and Western metaphysics, and a range of cultural material that includes the writings of Plato, Kant, August Comte, Balzac, and Shakespeare, to name a few. He argues that although philosophy has been instrumental in the past in establishing laws of logic and rationality that have been crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the most pressing tasks of thought today is to recognize that such pockets of unity are islands of order in a sea of multiplicity–a sea which cannot really be conceived, but which perhaps can still be sensed, felt, and heard raging in chaos beneath the momentary crests of order imposed by human civilization.

Philosophy of science or prose poetry, a classical meditation on metaphysics or a stream-of-consciousness polemic and veiled invective, Serres mounts a quirky, at times rhapsodical, but above all a “noisy” critique of traditional and current models in social theory, historiography, and aesthetics. The result is a work that is at once provocative, poetic, deeply personal, and ultimately religious–an apocalyptic call for the rebirth of philosophy as the art of thinking the unthinkable.

Malefeasance

In this highly original and provocative book, Michel Serres reflects on the relation between nature and culture and analyzes the origins of the world’s contemporary environmental problems. He does so through the surprising proposition that our cleanliness is our dirt. While all living beings pollute to lay claim to their habitat, humans have multiplied pollution’s effects catastrophically since the Industrial Revolution through the economic system’s mode of appropriation and its emphasis on mindless growth. He warns that while we can measure what he calls “hard pollution”—the poisoning of the Earth—we ignore at our peril the disastrous impact of the “soft pollution” created by sound and images on our psyches. Sounding the alarm that the planet is heading for disaster, Serres proposes that humanity should stop trying to “own” the world and become “renters.” Building on his earlier work, especially that on hominization, he urges us to establish a “natural contract” with nature.

The Birth of Physics

The Birth of Physics represents a foundational work in the development of chaos theory from one of the world’s most influential living theorists, Michel Serres.
Focussing on the largest text still intact to reach us from the Atomists – Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura – Serres mobilises everything we know about the related scientific work of the time (Archemides, Epicurus et al) in order to demand a complete reappraisal of the legacy. Crucial to his reconception of the Atomists’ thought is a recognition that their model of atomic matter is essentially a fluid one – they are describing the actions of turbulence, which impacts our understanding of the recent disciplines of chaos and complexity. It explains the continuing presence of Lucretius in the work of such scientific giants as Nobel Laureates Schroedinger and Prigogine.
This book is truly a landmark in the study of ancient physics and has been enormously influential on work in the area, amongst other things stimulating a more general rebirth of philosophical interest in the ancients.

The Five Senses 

Marginalized by the scientific age the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. With The Five Senses Serres traces a topology of human perception, writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle’s label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?
The book won the inaugural Prix Médicis Essai in 1985. The Revelations edition includes an introduction by Steven Connor.

The Natural Contract

Global environmental change, argues Michel Serres, has forced us to reconsider our relationship to nature. In this translation of his influential 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel, Serres calls for a natural contract to be negotiated between Earth and its inhabitants.
World history is often referred to as the story of human conflict. Those struggles that are seen as our history must now include the uncontrolled violence that humanity perpetrates upon the earth, and the uncontrollable menace to human life posed by the earth in reaction to this violence. Just as a social contract once brought order to human relations, Serres believes that we must now sign a “natural contract” with the earth to bring balance and reciprocity to our relations with the planet that gives us life. Our survival depends on the extent to which humans join together and act globally, on an earth now conceived as an entity.
Tracing the ancient beginnings of modernity, Serres examines the origins and possibilities of a natural contract through an extended meditation on the contractual foundations of law and science. By invoking a nonhuman, physical world, Serres asserts, science frees us from the oppressive confines of a purely social existence, but threatens to become a totalitarian order in its own right. The new legislator of the natural contract must bring science and law into balance.
Serres ends his meditation by retelling the story of the natural contract as a series of parables. He sees humanity as a spacecraft that with the help of science and technology has cast off from familiar moorings. In place of the ties that modernity and analytic reason have severed, we find a network of relations both stranger and stronger than any we once knew, binding us to one another and to the world. The philosopher’s harrowing and joyous task, Serres tells us, is that of comprehending and experiencing the bonds of violence and love that unite us in our spacewalk to the spaceship Mother Earth.

The Parasite

Influential philosopher Michel Serres’s foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue—creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought.

The Troubadour of Knowledge

What do we do when we raise a child, teach a student, or educate a person as a member of society? For the French philosopher Michel Serres, all of these forms of pedagogy require painful yet exhilarating departures from home and encounters with Otherness. Like a swimmer who plunges into the river’s current to reach the opposite bank, the person who wishes to learn must risk a voyage from the familiar to the strange. True education, Serres writes, takes place in the fluid middle of this crossing. To be educated is to become a harlequin, a crossbreed, a hybrid of our origins—like a newborn child, complexly produced as a mixture of maternal and paternal genes, yet an independent existence, separated from the familiar and determined.

In this wide-ranging meditation on learning and difference, Serres—the scientist turned epistemologist, philosopher turned moralist, reveler of being a half-breed from every point of view—explores numerous pathways in philosophy, science, and literature to argue that the best contemporary education requires knowledge of both science’s general truths and literature’s singular stories. He heralds a new pedagogy which claims that from the crossbreeding of the humanities and the sciences a new educational ideal can be born: the troubadour of knowledge.

With his agile and poetic voice, Serres has created a meditation of precisely this pluralistic creation, deftly recognizing it as a third party bred not of orderly dialectics but of the destabilizing multiplicity of the present age. Those who know the enormous range and clarity of this thinker will welcome this latest volume translated into English by Sheila Glaser with the assistance of William Paulson.

Thumbelina

The title of this timely and thought-provoking book, a French bestseller, refers to schoolgirls sending text messages to their friends on their smart phones. Michel Serres, one of France’s most important living intellectuals, uses this image to get at something far broader: that humans are formed and shaped by technologies, and that with the advent of computers, smart phones, and the Internet, a new human is being born.
These new humans beings are our children—thumbelina (petite poucette) and tom thumb (petit poucet)—but technologies have been changing so fast that parents scarcely know their children. Serres documents this cultural revolution, arguing that there have been several similar revolutions in the past: from oral cultures to cultures focused on reading and writing; the advent of the printing press; and now the complex changes brought about by the new information technologies—changes that are taking place at an accelerated pace and that affect us all.

Times of Crisis 

For Michel Serres, economic crises are earthquakes caused by societal tectonic plates. The current crisis erupted because of the widening discrepancy between major social changes and institutions that have remained the same since WWII.
Serres, one of the first to bring nature into the political, writes, “To destroy, kill, exploit is worthless. In the long run, it means destroying ourselves.” At a time when the world population has grown so much that it is exhausting natural resources and the environment, we need to rethink cultural, social, and political dynamics. Serres argues that geopolitics and economics will no longer be a two-player game, between West and East, for example, but a three-player one, in which is Earth will be the third partner.
This book is one of hope as it calls for a new world and extols the importance of science for our future and political institutions. Here, Serres demonstrates an optimistic outlook in a clear and luminous language that offers new paths for reflection and, ultimately, a better life for Earth and its inhabitants.

Variations on the Body

World-renowned philosopher, Michel Serres writes a text in praise of the body and movement, in praise of teachers of physical education, coaches, mountain guides, athletes, dancers, mimes, clowns, artisans, and artists. Variations on the Body describes the variations, the admirable metamorphoses that the body can accomplish.

 

Books on Serres in English

Reading Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time (Maria L. Assad, SUNY Press, 1999)

Blurb

This book identifies a new perspective on time and temporality in the work of the French writer Michel Serres. Time is the veiled notion that underlies Serres’s many epistemological parables and fables, and is a consistent metaphor throughout his work. Assad uncovers this common thread through a sustained discussion of certain key concepts in chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, and these concepts come into focus as she continues her detailed readings of Serres’s texts, demonstrating close analogies in his work to the discourses of science, literature, and philosophy.

TOC

Introduction

1              Time Promised: Reading Genèse

2              Time Immortal: Reading Détachement

3              Time Empirical: Reading Les cinq sens

4              Time Dynamical: Reading Statues

5              Time Inventive: Reading Le Tiers-lnstruit

6              Time and Earth: Reading Le Contrat naturel

Epilogue

 

Mapping Michel Serres (ed. Niran Abbas, University of Michigan Press, 2005)

Blurb

The work of Michel Serres—including the books Hermes, The Parasite, The Natural Contract, Genesis, The Troubadour of Knowledge, and Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time—has stimulated readers for years, as it challenges the boundaries of science, literature, culture, language, and epistemology. The essays in Mapping Michel Serres, written by the leading interpreters of his work, offer perspectives from a range of disciplinary positions, including literature, language studies, and cultural theory. Contributors include Maria Assad, Hanjo Berressem, Stephen Clucas, Steven Connor, Andrew Gibson, René Girard, Paul Harris, Marcel Hénaff, William Johnsen, William Paulson, Marjorie Perloff, Philipp Schweighauser, Isabella Winkler, and Julian Yates.

TOC

Introduction, Niran Abbas
From Ritual to Science, René Girard
Swimming the Channel, William Paulson
Frères amis, Not Enemies: Serres between Prigogine and Girard, William Johnsen
“Incerto Tempore Incertisque Locis”: The Logic of the Clinamen and the Birth of Physics, Hanjo Berressem
Liquid History: Serres and Lucretius, Stephen Clucas
Serres at the Crossroads, Andrew Gibson
“Multiple Pleats”: Some Applications of Michel Serres’s Poetics, Marjorie Perloff
The Smooth Operator: Serres Prolongs Poe, Paul Harris
The Desire for Unity and Its Failure: Reading Henry Adams through Michel Serres, Philipp Schweighauser
Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens, Steven Connor
Of Stones, Angels, and Humans: Michel Serres and the Global City, Marcel Hénaff
“The Gift Is a Given”: On the Errant Ethic of Michel Serres, Julian Yates
“Being Free to Write for a Woman”: The Question of Gender in the Work of Michel Serres, Maria Assad
Love, Death, and Parasites, Isabella Winkler

 

Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (Christopher Watkin, Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

Blurb

  • The first full introduction to Serres, from The System of Leibniz (1968) to his final publications in 2019
  • The first assessment of Serres’ thought as a whole
  • Works from the original French to engage with the broadest range of Serres texts: both his translated works and his major untranslated works
  • Provides a resource for scholars in philosophy, ecology, new materialisms, literature, the history and philosophy of science and the history of ideas
  • Brings Serres into conversation with other major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy
    Focuses on the repeated moves that characterise Serres’ thinking, opening up his writing for scholars across disciplines and showing how his ideas can be brought to bear on new areas
    Christopher Watkin provides a true overview of Serres’ thinking. Using diagrams to explain Serres’ thought, the first half of the book carefully explores Serres’ ‘global intuition’ – how he understands and engages with the world – and his ‘figures of thought’, the repeated intellectual moves that characterise his unique approach. The second half explores in detail Serres’ revolutionary contributions to the areas of language, objects and ecology.

All told, Watkin shows that Michel Serres has produced a cross-disciplinary body of work that provides a crucial and as yet under-exploited reference for current debates in post-humanism, object oriented ontology, ecological thought and the environmental humanities.

TOC

Introduction: Michel Serres Today
Part I
1. How Serres Thinks: Leibniz, Plato, Descartes
2. Space and Time
3. Serres’ Style
Part II: 4. Language
5. Objects
6. Ecology
Envoi
Bibliography

 

Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contempoary (ed. Rick Dolphijn, Bloomsbury 2019)

Blurb

Michel Serres captures the urgencies of our time; from the digital revolution to the ecological crisis to the future of the university, the crises that code the world today are addressed in an accessible, affirmative and remarkably original analysis in his thought.

This volume is the first to engage with the philosophy of Michel Serres, not by writing ‘about’ it, but by writing ‘with’ it. This is done by expanding upon the urgent themes that Serres works on; by furthering his materialism, his emphasis on communication and information, his focus on the senses, and the role of mathematics in thought. His famous concepts, such as the parasite, ‘amis de viellesse’, and the algorithm are applied in 21st century situations. With contributions from an international and interdisciplinary team of authors, these writings tackle the crises of today and affirm the contemporary relevance of Serres’ philosophy.

TOC

Introduction: Procedural Thinking by Rick Dolphijn, Utrecht University, the Netherlands

Chapter 1. The Virtue of Sensibility – David Webb, Staffordshire University, UK
Chapter 2. Cosmoliteracy and Anthropography, Vera Bühlmann, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Chapter 3. The Mathematical Anamneses – Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier, Kingston University London, UK)
Chapter 4. Kill is kiss, words are rats – Eugenie Brinkema, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Chapter 5. The Exogenesis of Light – Matteo Pasquinelli, Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Germany
Chapter 6. Scintillant @ the University of Angelic Invention, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Chapter 7. The World, the Mat(t)er of Thought, Rick Dolphijn, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Chapter 8. The Grace of Extinction, Patricia McCormack, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Chapter 9. A New Culture that Suits the World, Interview with Michel Serres by Janina Pigaht, Documentary Filmmaker and Rick Dolphijn, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, translated by Joeri Visser, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

 

Mathematics and Information in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Vera Bühlmann, Bloomsbury 2020)

Blurb

This book introduces the reader to Serres’ unique manner of ‘doing philosophy’ that can be traced throughout his entire oeuvre: namely as a novel manner of bearing witness.

It explores how Serres takes note of a range of epistemologically unsettling situations, which he understands as arising from the short-circuit of a proprietary notion of capital with a praxis of science that commits itself to a form of reasoning which privileges the most direct path (simple method) in order to expend minimal efforts while pursuing maximal efficiency. In Serres’ universal economy, value is considered as a function of rarity, not as a stock of resources. This book demonstrates how Michel Serres has developed an architectonics that is coefficient with nature.

Mathematic and Information in the Philosophy of Michel Serres acquaints the reader with Serres’ monist manner of addressing the universality and the power of knowledge – that is at once also the anonymous and empty faculty of incandescent, inventive thought.

The chapters of the book demarcate, problematize and contextualize some of the epistemologically unsettling situations Serres addresses, whilst also examining the particular manner in which he responds to and converses with these situations.

TOC

Foreword
Chapter one: Introduction
The plan of this book
Chapter two: Quantum literacy
Elementary indecision
Communication versus production: Bearing witness, and literacy
Cultivating indecision: The quantum domain’s domesticity
Ciphers, zeroness, equations: Architectonics of nothing
Chance-bound objects
Taking ignorance into account: Quantifying strangeness
Entropy and negentropy
The price of information as a measure for an object’s strangeness
Quantum literacy: Towards a novel theory of the subject
‘La Langue est une Puissance’
Chapter three: Chronopedia I: Counting time
Meteora: The wisdom of the weather
Code: A rosetta stone, a double staircase
Time modelled as contemporaneity
Counting time: Equinox and solstice
The turning points for modelled beginnings and ends
Of tables and models
Sense means significance and direction
Meteora
A logos genuine to the world – ‘Le Logiciél Intra-Matériel’
Software, hardware
Economy of maxima and minima: An anarchic logos
Chapter four: Chronopedia II: Treasuring time
Homothesis as the locus in quo of the universal’s presence
1st iteration (acquiring a space of possibility)
2nd iteration (learning to speak a language in which no one is native)
3rd iteration (setting the stage for thought to comprehend itself)
4th iteration (intelligence that is immanent and coextensive with the universe)
5th iteration (inventing a scale of reproduction)
6th iteration (the formula, a double-articulating application)
The amorous nature of intellectual conception
1st iteration (marking all that is assumed to be constant with a cipher)
2nd iteration (confluence of multiple geneses)
3rd iteration (the residence of that which is genuinely migrational)
4th iteration (universal genitality)
5th iteration (mathematics is the circuit of cunning reason’s ruses)
6th iteration (the real as a black spectrum)
Chapter five: Banking universality: The magnitudes of ageing
Metaphysics
The quickness of a magnanimous universe
Invariance: Genericness in terms of entropy and negentropy
Genuine and immanent to the all of time: Le ‘logiciel intra-matériel’
White metaphysics: How old does the world think it is?
Freedom
The neutral element: Materialism of identity
(Pan’s) glossematics: The economy that deals with ‘purport’
Quanta of contemporaneity: Heat to incandescence, storage to bank account
Quantum writing: Substitutes step in to address things themselves
Chapter six: The incandescent Paraclete: Tables of plenty
Equatoriality generalized
Coming of age, liking sunset and sunrise
How to combine precision with finesse or: euphoria contained by instruments that behave like cornucopia
The (mathematical) inverse of Pantopia is not a utopia: Law in the panonymy of the whole world
The objective mentality and character of instruments
The vicarious order of knowledge that is authentic to the world
Pan: The excitable subject of universal knowledge
Generational con-sequentiality
Blessed curiosity
Exodic discourse
Chapter seven: Sophistication and anamnesis: Retrograde movement of truth, remembering an abundant past
The currency of knowledge
The price of truth, and the price of information
The convertibility of truth
Classicism: Remembering contemporaneity
Classical analysis, symbolical analysis
Interlude: The Tower of Eiffel, archetypical symbol of existentialism?
Building a cipher
A corpus of intelligent forms
The technical order of an object that is comfortable
How to reason the sum total of all archetypes?
Towards critique with regard to the symbolic alchemy of myth-making
A realist classicism
Familiarizing ourselves as strangers, native to the universe
The domain of the quasi: Instructive analysis, character dispositions
How can reason in general learn from singularities?
Of genealogical and of tabular orders: Eating ‘next to’ (parasite)
Heterogeneous scales, logistical uniformality (forms of operation)
Indexical address: The referential of the centre
Respecting order by challenging it
Cunning ruses: The anarchic architectonic way of paying respect
How to address the third-person singular?
Augmentation, not authorship
Anarchic civility, and the meanings of cultures
Chapter eight Coda: Quantum literacy and architectonic dispositioning
Architecture and philosophy
Chapter zero: Instead of a conclusion: The static tripod

 

Articles on Serres in English

An Introduction to Michel Serres’s Philosophy – Bruno Latour

Philosophy Now obituary (incluides suggestions for further reading)

 

Blogs and websites

Steven Connor has many wonderful papers and essays taht engage with Serres on his website.

 

 

Over at Agent Swarm, Terence Blake has a wealth of material on Serres, including:

Here’s another blog with occasional updates.

Videos in English

The Philosophy of Michel Serres, with David Webb

Michel Serres: Thinking in Figures

 

Videos in French

The Humanities in Europe Interview Series – Prof. Michel Serres

Dialogue Michel Serres et Bernard Stiegler (complet)

Michel Serres – Conférence : “Darwin, Bonaparte et le Samaritain“, et la philosophie de l’histoire”

Conférence de Michel Serres – “Sciences et société”

For many years Michel Serres and his friend Michel Polacco hosted a weekly 5 minute show, ‘Le Sens de l’info’, on France Info radio. In each episode they take a theme and reflect upon it from a philosophical perspective. Here is the archive.

 

Scholars

This is a *VERY* incomplete list of scholars working on Serres’s thought. There are lots of names to add. Help me by dropping me an email or leaving a comment.

Terence Blake

Vera Bühlmann

Steven Connor

Rick Dolphijn

Joanna Hodge

Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier

Marjolein Oele

Massimiliano Simons here and here

Brian Treanor

Christopher Watkin

David Webb

Michel Serres