This September I had the privilege of taking part in a panel at SPEP 2020 (postponed until 2021) alongside Marjolein Oele and Brian Treanor. “Remembering and Thinking with Michel Serres” ranged over issues related to Serres’s contemporaneity, his natural contract idea, and the distinctiveness of his thought.

Here is a recording of Brian’s paper and mine (Marjolein’s brilliant paper was work in progress and not yet ready for public release).

The text of my paper:

Thinking in Figures: The Distinctiveness of Michel Serres

Introduction

In this paper I would like to explore not what Michel Serres thinks about this or that subject, but how he thinks about everything. I would like to show that his thought has a distinct character and power that stands alongside contemporaries such as Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, and I would like to offer some reflections on the very idea of attempting to characterise the thought of a given philosopher.

Michel Serres published consistently from the late 1960s until his death in 2019. He authored over forty-five books on subjects of contemporary importance ranging from the future of humanity to the nature of social relations and ecology, including three French bestsellers,[i] and there are reportedly four posthumous full-length works still to be published.

If we want to understand how Serres thinks throughout his career, we need to go to his early magnum opus, The System of Leibniz and its Mathematical Models. Weighing in at 800 pages and around 300 000 words, Le Systùme de Leibniz 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,[ii] 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 of 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.

In this book we see the birth of a series of characteristic Serresian moves or patterns that distinguish his subsequent thought, and set him apart from his more famous contemporaries.

Figures of thought

Serres calls these distinctive moves “figures of thought”, but his figures are more than generic “patterns” or “tendencies”.

First, he characterises figures as algorithmic operators,[iii] complex functions for producing an infinite variety of outputs from infinite possibilities of inputs.

Secondly, figures of thought are a natural phenomenon, no mere cultural artefact. So, for example, species of flora and fauna are figures (GB 15), understood as new inventions or branchings in the Great Story of the universe. Whatsoever figures may exist, in whatever form and in whatever context, ‘they all emerge from the movement of the Universe, of life, of the body, of cultures, in short of thought’ (GB 178).[iv] There is, then, a fundamental continuity between the way Serres understands the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of thought.[v]

Thirdly, figures are also found in literature: Ulysses, Don Quixote, Harlequin and Pierrot or the Grand Inquisitor are all figures, just as much as the daisy, the Fosbury flop, or the pas de deux. In each case they draw together the general and the individual. These literary figures are superior to abstract ideas in Serres’s eyes because they better represent the truth of ideas than ideas themselves: a beautiful man or woman is beautiful in a way that the abstract idea of beauty is not. Serres’ figures, in other words, are not merely descriptive but also performative, not only merely mimetic but also participatory.

Serres’ twin insistence on the natural origin of all figures of thought, and on their (literary or fleshly) incarnation, sets them apart from other attempts to label philosophical moves, such as the ‘philosopheme’ evoked by Derrida and others,[vi] from Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts which it is the business of philosophy to create, and also from the conceptual personae of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? The latter are generic nouns, categories that can be preceded with the definite article rather than named individuals: the friend, the enemy, the foreigner, the stranger, the deportee, or the revolutionary people.[vii] These conceptual personae are in the service of concepts; they ‘carry out the movements that describe the author’s plane of immanence, and they play a part in the very creation of the author’s concepts’, and ‘will themselves inspire original concepts’.[viii]

It is clear that Serres admires and draws from Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual personae, but there are some important differences between Deleuzian conceptual personae and Serres’ character concepts. Whereas for Deleuze and Guattari the conceptual persona serves the creation of concepts, for Serres the concept is a distillation and reduction from the character who gives it life. For Serres, the character is both the origin and the end of the concept.

When he is asked directly whether his character-concepts, like Deleuze’s conceptual personae, are ‘heteronyms of Michel Serres’, he answers categorically:

No, in no way. It is in fact quite the opposite. If it were me, it would not be interesting. What Deleuze defines, basically, is the equivalence between a character and a novel: ‘Madam Bovary is me’, Flaubert said. Now, in my case the characters are true incarnations. Hermes, for example, is the man of the new age, when the paradigm of communication replaces the paradigm of production. He succeeds Prometheus. (Pan 72-3)[ix]

I would like to give a sense of the distinctiveness of Serres’s figures of thought by sketching two of the main ones now.

Umbilical thinking

It is usual for a thinker to pit her interventions against what she considers a pervasive misconception in conventional thought, whether it is Heidegger’s forgetting of being, the logocentrism of Derrida’s Of Grammatology or the dogmatic image of thought of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

But to what does Serres’s thought oppose itself? The answer to that question is captured most succinctly in the term “umbilical thinking”. 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. In Le Systùme de Leibniz Serres condemns what he calls ‘umbilical disciplines’ or ‘queen disciplines’ that claim to speak the zero-degree truth of all other discourses. 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.

It is umbilical to claim that everything is, at bottom, economic, or biological, or psychoanalytic


  • Linguistic structuralism is umbilical because it assumes that the linguistic model with its groups of transformation, phonemes and oppositional couples can adequately account for systems of relations in non-linguistic phenomena such as myth (MS 26).
  • The Copernican Revolution is umbilical when it assumes that the sun is the only heavenly body that can act as a fixed point.
  • The Cartesian cogito is umbilical insofar as it extracts ‘the thinking thing’ from the Harlequin-like complexity of life, and erects it as the ‘ticket office’ through which all truth must pass.

In fact, modernity itself is characteristically and irreducibly umbilical, obsessed with the search for the fixed point in terms of which to make sense of the whole.

Serres’s umbilicism, along with Derrida’s logocentrism and Deleuze’s dogmatic image of thought, is a narrowing: it reduces a complex state of affairs to one of its components and falsely denies difference. But it differs from both of them in that it does not reject the definite or even the dogmatic out of hand. As we shall now see, Serres has his own way of dealing with dogmatism.

Umbilical thinking bears similarities to other mid- and late-twentieth century French diagnoses of the malady of modernity. Most notably, of course, to Buno Latour’s modern asymmetric thinking that refuses hybrids, where Serres’ influence is readily acknowledged, but also to Derrida’s logocentrism and Deleuze’s dogmatic image of thought, both of which create dichotomies by simplifying or reducing difference. Where Serres’s focus differs from that of Derrida and Deleuze, however, is in the prominence he accords to the idea of the queen discourse coming to control a plurality of other discourses, and the concomitant denial that each discourse or mode has a unique and irreplaceable truth. Deleuze is content to write predominantly in a philosophical register, and while Derrida does touch on this Serresian concern in texts like ‘The Double session’ he nevertheless remains more limited in his choice of discourses, but discursive plurality is fundamental to Serres’s approach.

Opposition by multiplication

The second figure of thought I would like to explore today is what Serres proposes in the place of umbilical thinking. He calls it “opposition by generalisation” or “opposition by multiplication”. Deleuze overturns Platonism by elevating the simulacrum to the controlling role in the construction of truth; Derrida disrupts the Platonic sun by destabilising truth’s origin and deconstructing its presence, but Serres opposes Platonic truth by multiplying it. We can most readily understand this opposition by multiplication through Serres’s retelling of Plato’s cave allegory itself.

At its simplest, Serres’ response to Plato is to multiply the single sun into plural sources of true knowledge. He begins by rethinking Copernican cosmology. Copernicus placed the sun at the centre of the solar system, but Kepler’s laws of planetary motion state that the elliptical orbits of heavenly bodies have not one but two centres: the first almost exactly coincides with the location of the sun,[x] but there is also ‘a second focus, of which no one ever speaks, as efficacious and necessary as the first, a sort of second black sun’ (TI 69/TK 37).[xi] There is not one centre, but two.

In moving beyond this bifocal paradigm, Serres gives his multiplication of suns its own cave allegory to set alongside Plato’s, not a story of escaping the cave to find the light, but of finding a cave full of its own lights. It is drawn from the nineteenth chapter Jules Verne’s The Vanished Diamond, which describes an underground bejewelled cave into which the novel’s heros descend with lanterns, in which light is reflected and refracted as in thousands of prisms. It is a systematic rewriting of Plato’s allegory.

  1. Plato’s captive has to leave the cave in order to find the light, but Verne invites us to enter the cave.
  2. Plato has one central sun driving away shadows; Verne has one central shadow and thousands of little suns (see TI 82/TK 46).
  3. For Plato it is one single, isolated captive who finds the sun; Verne has two voyagers experience the cave, their twin lights multiplying the effect of the reflections they experience in its bosom, pluralising the subject of truth.
  4. Plato’s sun is transcendent, inhuman and overpowering; the torches that light Verne’s cave are manufactured, human, and unremarkable, rewriting and de-dramatising Nietzsche’s parable of the madman in The Gay Science. In Serres’ Vernian cave, we must imagine Nietzsche’s madman happy.
  5. Plato’s captive has the good fortune to exit the cave at noon, experiencing the shadowless sun of a cloudless day. Verne’s light, by contrast, is described in terms of ‘the chaotic and fluid twinkling of possible glimmers’ which ‘open a thousand and one ways’ (GB 204).[xii]

So Serres’s cave allegory is one of multiple, complementary, secular, qualified truth. He opposes Platonic truth not by overturning or deconstructing Platonism, but by multiplying the Platonic sun.

Global intuition

This opposition by multiplication is just one of Serres’s figures of thought. But such figures do not stand in isolation from each other. They cohere to form what Serres calls a “global intuition”, a ‘new way of being in the world’[xiii] or ‘a different style of thinking and writing—style as a method of seeing and understanding things’.[xiv]

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).[xv] This is crucial to understanding Serres’s project. In evocative, poetic books like Biogea or The Parasite, Serres is not primarily communicating information but offering us a way of living in the world, a set of textual and corporeal sensitivities and resonances that predispose to certain attitudes and predispositions.

Serres describes five characteristic features of such intuitions. First, intuition stands at the beginning 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. 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).

Secondly, Serresian intuition is ‘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).[xvi] Intuition is corporeal. It is a pre-theoretical sensitivity to what Serres calls the rhythms and sounds of existence out of which meaning and language emerge. This 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.[xvii]

Intuition, thirdly, is ‘global’. An intuition does not pertain to an isolated phenomenon or a particular problem, but to the nature of experience and of the world as such, and specifically to what must necessarily be. An intuition is not something that we experience in the world but a way of looking at and making sense of everything we experience in the world: a how, not a what.

Fourthly, Serres is not simply seeking to describe his global intuition, but to produce it in his reader. This is a crucial point. An intuition requires cultivation, reflection, meditation. It may come in a flash but it takes work to inhabit it. For instance, Serres urges that, in order to intuit the vast time that has elapsed since the big bang and its implications for our understanding of ourselves and the world, ‘we have to carry out a theoretical effort as well as an existential one: trying to live and understand the content and stakes of this new ancientness’ (In 190/Inc 105, translation altered).[xviii]

It also follows from this desire to produce rather than describe that Serres’ style of writing will play an important role in inculcating in his reader the rhythms and sensibilities of his global intuition. Serres’ texts do not represent his global intuition but participate in it, inviting the reader to participate with them. This accent on participation also sets Serres’ global intuition apart from Foucault’s epistemes in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Whereas Foucault’s dĂ©marche is descriptive, and he refuses to describe the archive of his own historical moment,[xix] Serres engages in an active construction of a new global intuition based on recent discoveries in the sciences and newly minted philosophical theories.

Fifthly, Serres is seeking ‘not above all to be right’. Let it be said loudly and clearly that this does not amount to claiming that he cares nothing for truth. He is saying, rather, that being right or wrong is a status within a particular global intuition of the world, a move within a particular game, less ‘profound and sensible’ than the global intuition that makes sense of it. Being right is a matter of verification; measuring something against an existing standard to see if it conforms. It is of great use, but it creates nothing new. Intuition, by contrast, is responsible for the ‘great inventions’ (Ec 62/C 39) of thought, such as Bergson’s intuition that time is duration, or Galileo’s that the universe is written in the language of mathematics (RH 179, see also R 83/Ro 52).

Conclusion

The identification of figures of thought and a global intuition provides a path (Greek: hodos), through five decades of Serresian thought, but as I conclude I would like to turn to a broader question: to what extent can it furnish a method (meta-hodos) for investigating other bodies of work and other thinkers? The response hangs on what we understand by ‘method’. If we take it to mean a set of figures of thought, defined in Serres’ specific sense, and a global intuition with all the particular nuances he gives to that term, then no, it is not transferrable. Figures of thought and global intuitions are tools uniquely suited to getting to grips with Serres’ thought, and they would impose a more or less alien interpretative grid on any other thinker.

The method is powerfully transferrable, however, if it is understood in terms of its own algorithms or figures, rather than the particular outputs of those algorithms in Serres’ case. In other words, the method proceeds by paying attention to the local moves made in a body of thought, which may or (in a very few cases) may not be repeated from one text to the next. Having assembled these species of figure, the method then explores to what extent they admit of genera with family resemblances. No assumption need be made about how the local moves will or will not cohere into a global account; all degrees of coherence and incoherence yield interesting insights about a given philosophy. Whether or not the figures cohere into a global intuition, the approach avoids the atomizing analysis of individual figures.

As I close, I offer this final thought: what every great philosophy offers us, beyond its propositions and concepts, is at bottom a global intuition, not merely a way of understanding ourselves and the world but a way of being in the world, somatically, affectively, psychologically, intellectually. It makes certain things in the world visible to us, and others comparatively invisible; it makes certain things and states of affairs valuable, and others trivial. And Serres’s particular global intuition is, as the following papers in this panel will show, acutely needed in our day.

 

[i] Petite Poucette (2007) sold over 300 000 copies in France and Temps des crises (2009) also entered the best-seller lists. In the 1990s Éclaircissements (1992), a series of interviews with Bruno Latour, was also a best-seller.

[ii] Jean-Marie Auzias cheekily calls the publication of Le SystĂšme ‘perhaps the most interesting event of the year’/’peut-ĂȘtre l’évĂ©nement le plus intĂ©ressant de cette annĂ©e’, Jean-Marie Auzias, Michel Serres, philosophe occitan (Lyon: FĂ©dĂ©rop/Jorn, 1992) 15.

[iii] ‘Operator’ is the preferred term of those who seek to engage with Serres’s figures of thought. Sydney LĂ©vy argues that in his books Serres ‘has constructed, if not precisely concepts, cognitive “operators”- means of understanding that are at once inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary’ (Sydney LĂ©vy, ‘Introduction: An Ecology of Knowledge: Michel Serres’, in SubStance 26:2 (1997) Special Issue: An Ecology of Knowledge: Michel Serres, 3-5, 3) , and Pierpaolo Antonello insists that ‘Noise,” “parasite,” “hermaphrodite” are heuristic operators and “philosophical characters”’ (Antonello, ‘Celebrating a Master’ 167) in the same way that metaphors and models are explanatory devices in scientiïŹc discourse. However, the term lacks the richness that Serres gives to ‘figure’ in Le Gaucher boiteux. The only contemporary of Serres to use the term ‘figure of thought’, though in a very different sense to Serres himself, is Alain Badiou who, in Conditions, argues that ‘mathematics was for Plato always a singular figure of thought’ (Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008) 109) and in Handbook of Inaesthetics he insists that ‘dance instead integrates space into its essence. It is the only figure of thought to do this’ (Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) 63). Neither of Badiou’s senses are what Serres intends by the term.

[iv] ‘[t]ous Ă©mergent du mouvement de l’Univers, de la vie, du corps, des cultures, en somme de la pensĂ©e.’

[v] This affinity will be explored at length in Chapters Four and Six.

[vi] Derrida uses the term ‘philosopheme’ across a number of texts, sometimes in apposition to ‘philosophical idea’, ‘concept’ or ‘metaphysical concept’ (see, for example, Du droit à la philosophie, Voyoux and ‘La mythologie blanche’ in Marges de la philosophie). In addition, Theodor Adorno claims that ‘Auschwitz confirmed the Philosopheme of pure identity as death’ (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990) 362), and Badiou refers to ‘the philosopheme of the One’ (Badiou, Conditions 181).

[vii] These are the six conceptual personae treated at length by Gregg Lambert in Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

[viii] Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 63; ‘Les personnages conceptuels en revanche opĂšrent les mouvements qui dĂ©crivent le plan d’immanence de l’auteur, et interviennent dans la crĂ©ation mĂȘme de ses concepts [
] ils [
] vont eux-mĂȘmes inspirer des concepts originaux’, Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2005) 62.

[ix] ‘Non, en aucun cas. C’est mĂȘme exactement le contraire. S’il s’agissait de moi, ce ne serait pas intĂ©ressant. Ce que Deleuze dĂ©finit, au fond, c’est l’Ă©quivalent d’un personnage de roman : « Madame Bovary, c’est moi », disait Flaubert. Or, dans mon cas, les personnages sont de vraies incarnations. HermĂšs, par exemple, c’est l’homme des temps nouveaux, quand le paradigme de la communication remplace le paradigme de la production. Il succĂšde Ă  PromĂ©thĂ©e.’ Later Serres adds the gloss that, if any of his characters resemble him, it is Pantope (Pan 106).

[x] The first focus is in fact at the centre of gravity of the solar system as a whole. Given that the sun contains 99.9% of the mass of the solar system, it almost exactly coincides with the position of the sun.

[xi] ‘un second foyer, dont nul ne parle jamais, tout aussi efficace et nĂ©cessaire que le premier, une sorte de deuxiĂšme soleil noir’.

[xii] ‘ici, mille lueurs nocturnes Ă©blouissent le penseur ; ici, les clignotants chaotiques et fluides des lueurs possibles ouvrent mille et une voies’.

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

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

[xv] ‘Vous me direz, Ă  juste titre, qu’Aristote ne justifie rien et ne constitue pas un argument ; et je vous rĂ©pondrai que mon but n’est pas d’avoir raison Ă  toute force, mais de produire une intuition globale, profonde et sensĂ©e.’

[xvi] ‘[q]uelque activitĂ© Ă  laquelle on se livre, le corps demeure le support de l’intuition, de la mĂ©moire, du savoir, du travail et surtout de l’invention’.

[xvii] 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.

[xviii] ‘Nous devons aujourd’hui accomplir un effort thĂ©orique aussi bien qu’existentiel : tenter de vivre et de comprendre le contenu et l’enjeu de cette anciennetĂ© nouvelle’.

[xix] Foucault readily admits that his own writing depends on ‘conditions and rules of which I am very largely unaware’ (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002) xv), and he affirms that we cannot adequately describe our own archive (i.e., our own historical moment) because we are part of it (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971) 130).