Michel Serres
-
Podcast: “Renewing our Mental Models With Michel Serres”
In June 2022 I had the privilege of giving a keynote address for the NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract conference at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, with the title “Renewing our Mental Models with Michel Serres”. The talk is now available as a podcast below. Abstract: As our understanding of the world changes over
-
Interview: Michel Serres, Philosophy and the Contemporary World
This week I was interviewed by David Webb for the 2020 SEP-FEP (Society of European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy) Conference coming up in November. The interview focused on the work of French philosopher Michel Serres (1930-2019), ranging over Serres’s style, politics, ecology, language, and my book Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press,
-
The natural contract: four objections answered
Abbreviations CN Le Contrat naturel Bi Biogée Bio Biogea GB Le Gaucher boiteux Hom Hominescence In L’Incandescent Inc The Incandescent NC The Natural Contract P Le Parasite Par The Parasite RH Récits d’humanisme TDC Temps des crises TOC Times of Crisis TU ‘Temps, usure : feux et signaux de brume’ In the previous
-
How a contract with the natural world can help us address the climate crisis
Since the publication of Michel Serres’s Le Contrat naturel (The Natural Contract) in 1990, the thesis that our social contract needs to be complemented and extended by a contract with the natural world has come in for sustained, and predictable, criticism. In this new mini-series of posts I want to clarify the natural contract idea,
-
So you want to read Michel Serres? Start here
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
-
Video of my Stanford talk. Michel Serres: Thinking in Figures
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
-
Michel Serres book excerpt: The end of the Neolithic
This is the seventh in a series 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. The following exceprt is from Chapter Six of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Ecology’
-
Michel Serres book excerpt: Pragmatogony, prehistory and the cadaverous object
This is the sixth in a series 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. The following exceprt is from Chapter Five of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Objects’
-
Michel Serres book excerpt: The origin of language
This is the fifth in a series 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. The following exceprt is from Chapter Four of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Language’
-
Michel Serres book excerpt: Percolation and multiple temporalities
This is the third in a series 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. The following exceprt is from Chapter Two of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Space
-
Michel Serres book excerpt: Let’s talk about Serres’ style
This is the fourth in a series 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. The following exceprt is from Chapter Three of Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, entitled ‘Serres’
-
Michel Serres book excerpt: Serres’ algorithmic universal
This is the second in a series 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. Serres’ algorithmic universal In addition to the sharp contrast between Cartesian analysis and Leibnizian combination,
-
Representing French and Francophone Studies with Michel Serres
I am delighted that my article “Representing French and Francophone Studies with Michel Serres” has just been published in the latest number of the Australian Journal of French Studies. Many thanks to Ash, Leslie and Gemma at the ANU who worked hard on the editing and wrote a splendid introduction to the AJFS special edition.
-
Why Michel Serres is, and is not, an ecological thinker
In this excerpt from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought I address the question of whether Serres should be considered an “ecological” thinker.
-
Kant, Foucault and Serres on the a priori
Michel Serres’ “objective transcendental” naturalises the a priori, taking a different path both to Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason and to Foucault’s “historical a priori”
-
Why Michel Serres? A Personal Reflection
On the day of Michel Serres’s death, I reflect on what drew me to write on this beguiling, prescient, inimitable thinker
-
Michel Serres and film 4: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville
This the fourth of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often
-
Michel Serres and film 3: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Trois Couleurs Bleu
[vc_row row_height_percent=”0″ overlay_alpha=”50″ gutter_size=”3″ column_width_percent=”100″ shift_y=”0″ z_index=”0″ shape_dividers=””][vc_column][vc_column_text] This the third of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating
-
Michel Serres and film 2: Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi
This the second of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often
-
Michel Serres and film 1: Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7
This the first of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often
-
Michel Serres book project update: Draft Introduction
For the past three and a half years I have been working on a monograph on the thought of Michel Serres. It has been an exhilarating and exhausting project, in the course of which I have largely forgotten what it feels like to be anywhere near an intellectual comfort zone. During these years I have
-
French Philosophy Today paperback now shipping
I just received my copy of French Philosophy Today in paperback. You can find it on Amazon here. Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Catherine Malabou, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour: this comparative, critical analysis shows the promises and perils of new French philosophy’s reformulation of the idea of the human. See here for chapter summaries.
-
YouTube video of my paper on Michel Serres and the Question of Alterity in Recent French Thought, with improved audio
I have now tidied up the video from yesterday’s seminar on “Michel Serres and the Question of Alterity in Recent French Thought” and improved the quality of the audio. Here is the new YouTube version:
-
Download the handout for my live-streamed paper on Serres and alterity this coming Tuesday
If you are planning to follow my live-streamed paper on Michel Serres and alterity on Periscope this coming Tuesday, you might want to download the handout that will be distributed to seminar participants. Here it is: The handout contains fourteen quotations and two diagrams to which I will refer in the course of the paper. During
-
I’m planning to tweet live video of my research seminar on Michel Serres and the Question of Alterity next Tuesday
Next Tuesday I will be giving a seminar at Deakin Univesity, Melbourne, on Michel Serres’s understanding of alterity. The paper comes from the first chapter of my book on Michel Serres, on which I have been able to do some more work recently. I’m trying to get permission from Deakin to tweet a live video
-
French Philosophy Today paperback now on Amazon pre-order
I am delighted to announce that the paperback edition of French Philosophy Today is now (finally!) available for pre-order on Amazon. The U.S. site has it at $39.95 and most European sites set the price at around €25. Curiously, amazon.co.uk has the paperback at £150, which I assume is a mistake soon to be corrected. Here is
-
French Philosophy Today reviewed at NDPR
French Philosophy Today has just been reviewed over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Here are some highlights: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famously defined philosophical production as concept creation. If they are correct, then Watkin’s work is not just a scholarly commentary of philosophy but also itself an inventive philosophical work. If Alain Badiou, the
-
French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 5 – Michel Serres
This is the fifth in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. With Michel Serres’s universal humanism (Chapter 5) the argument returns to the question of host capacities in
-
In this Sunday’s Age and Sydney Morning Herald I’m quoted talking about robots, consciousness and Descartes
With the publication of my book on contemporary limits and transformations of humanity coming out next month I had the chance this week to talk with John Elder of The Sunday Age about the future possibility of rights for robots. John’s article came out today in The Sunday Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, with the title “What happens
-
Michel Serres’s The Parasite: A Reader’s Guide. 148 page document to download
Over the past few weeks I have been working my way through Michel Serres’s 1980 Le Parasite: a dense, poetic, brilliant text that seeks to tear down and rebuild the way we think about everything. In reading the book I kept a running list of intertexts to which Serres refers, a document that runs to some
-
A diagrammatic snapshot of French philosophy from Magazine Littéraire, September 1977
Today I was given a copy of this edition of the Magazine Littéraire from September 1977 (thank you Philip). Its centrefold is a diagram seeking to represent flows of influence between contemporary philosophers. The table provides a fascinating snapshot… Marx is top and centre, flanked by Freud and Nietzsche. Influences are split between the two poles of
-
My article on Michel Serres, Biosemiotics and the “Great Story” of the Universe published in SubStance
My article “Michel Serres’ Great Story: From Biosemiotics to Econarratology” has just been published in SubStance. It is available from institutions with a subscription to Project Muse here. Abstract: In four key but as yet untranslated texts from 2001-2009, Michel Serres builds on his earlier biosemiotics with an econarratology he calls the ‘Great Story’ (Grand
-
Rethinking alterity and logocentrism after phenomenology with Serres’s L’Hermaphrodite: Sarrasine sculpteur (1987)
This post is part of the series of draft entries for a Michel Serres dictionary. Abbreviations: Conv: Serres and Latour, Conversations on Culture, Science and Time TI: Serres, Le Tiers instruit One of Serres’s three book-length engagements with literary authors, l’Hermaphrodite was written significantly later than Jouvences (1974, on Jules Verne) and Feux et signaux
-
Draft entry for a Michel Serres Dictionary: Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (1968)
Le Système de Leibniz was published during the heady anni mirabiles of late 1960s French thought. It appeared in 1968, the same year as Roland Barthes’s short essay ‘The Death of the Author’, one year after Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, and two years after Foucault’s The Order of Things. Like Derrida’s and
-
Michel Serres app now available on Google Play
I’ve written a little app to aggregate information from around the web (news, Twitter, Youtube, Google Scholar, Google Trends…) on Michel Serres. It’s nothing flash but it allows me quickly to scan various sources to see if there’s anything new on Serres, without having manually to visit plural URLs. It is free to download from
-
Michel Serres Today
Abstract. This is an expanded version of a paper originally given at the English and Theatre Studies research seminar at Melbourne University in May 2015, and it retains its oral tone. My intention both for the original paper and for this expanded version is to provide a first introduction to the work and thought of
-
Translation from Michel Serres’s thesis on Leibniz: “we must enrich our models of thinking which are, generally speaking, lamentably poor”
At the moment I am working my way through Michel Serres’s monumental Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques. I am struck by how many of the ideas that have come to be thought of as characteristically Serresian are already present implicitly or (more often than not) explicitly in this 800 page doctoral thesis. If it
-
Michel Serres Today: new paper uploaded to academia.edu
I have just uploaded a paper on Michel Serres to academia.edu. Here is the abstract: This is an expanded version of a paper originally given at the English and Theatre Studies research seminar at Melbourne University in May 2015, and it retains its oral tone. My intention both for the original paper and for this
-
Michel Serres: “There are two kinds of philosopher: there are philosophers who shackle you and philosophers who free you”
Peter Hallward: Heidegger’s works on language, and on being-with, did they have any value for you? Michel Serres: I was so busy with sciences and techniques that it was very difficult to throw myself into an author who refused them wholesale. There are two kinds of philosopher: there are philosophers who shackle you and philosophers
-
Consolidated list of all the Michel Serres primary bibliography posts
All the categories for the comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography are now up and running. I will keep adding titles over the coming months as I come across them, but in order to make the bibliography easier to navigate I have gathered below links to all the sections, as well as to the entire bibliography.
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (7): newspaper and magazine articles
(1974). “Michel Serres et Jules Verne.” Le Monde, 10 May. http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/03/05/eduquer-au-xxie-siecle_1488298_3232.html. Last accessed April 2015. (1979). “Le culte du ballon ovale.” Le Monde, 5 March. (1980). “Une présentation de la Nouvelle Alliance Commencements.” Le Monde, 4 January. (1982). “Un entretien avec Michel Serres: A quoi sert la philosophie?” Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 February, 82. (1982).
-
Video and image timeline of Michel Serres’ life and monograph publications
Timeline as jpeg (click on the image to open it on a page of its own, then click on it again to magnify. Use your browser’s scrollbar to move left and right across it): Timeline as a scrolling video:
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (6b): audio and video (with embedded video)
This instalment of the bibliography lists Serres’ film and television appearances, as well as those videos freely available on the web in which he features (see all the Serres bibliography posts together on this page). This is the second version of this section of the bibliography. In this version, videos from Youtube, Dailymotion and Vimeo
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (6a): audio and video (with links)
This part of the bibliography lists Serres’ film and television appearances, as well as those videos freely available on the web in which he features (see all the Serres bibliography posts together on this page). This is the first of two versions of this section of the bibliography. On the other version, Youtube, Dailymotion and
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (5): interviews
This list does not include audio and video interviews, which will appear in a future installment. There are one or two interviews featuring in other bibliographies that I do not include in this list, because 1) they refer to web links that are now broken and 2) the interview is not available elsewhere. Notably, the following item
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (4): single-authored and co-written articles
As before, let me know if you spot anything I’ve missed… (1961). “Descartes et Leibniz dans les deux manières de penser le réel et la science.” Critique no. 164. Hors série. (1962). “Géométrie de la folie.” Mercure de France 1188: 683-96. (1963). “La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en mathématiques et en épistémologie.”
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (3): archival material
Here is the latest instalment of the comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography: archival material. Archival material about but not written by Michel Serres is not included in this list, which gives a tantalizing glimpse into Serres’ early thought and intellectual formation. Serres, Michel. (Undated). “Essai sur le concept épistémologique d’interférence”. Thèse complémentaire présentée à la
-
Anzac Day reflection: “I have a body of war… And so I have a soul of peace”. Translation of a passage by Michel Serres from Le Sens de l’info
On Anzac day, here is a personal reflection on war from the philosopher Michel Serres. It comes from the very first edition of Le Sens de l’info, his weekly 6 minute live radio broadcast with Serres and Michel Polacco every Sunday on national French radio. The first episode was broadcast on September 5, 2004, entitled “Les États-Unis de George
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (2): prefaces, edited books and book chapters
Here is the second instalment of the comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography: prefaces, edited books and book chapters/sections. As before, if you spot a mistake or an omission please let me know and I will make the change. (1975). Comte, Auguste. Philosophie première, Cours de philosophie positive, leçons 1 à 45. Edited by François Dagonet
-
Towards a Comprehensive Michel Serres primary bibliography (1): single-authored and co-written books
I’m continuing work on the Michel Serres project and am currently compiling a primary bibliography, filmography, and list of TV appearances. Blimey, he’s written a lot! I have synthesized the bibliographies provided by Steven Connor, the EGS, amazon.fr, the Institut Michel Serres (who copy the EGS list), his Stanford page the IMDB, ina.fr, the Librairie