Biogea

by Michel Serres, Randolph Burks (Translator)

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. In these times when species are disappearing, when catastrophic events such as earthquakes and tsunamis impale the earth, Serres wonders if anyone “worries about the death pangs of the rivers.” And for Serres, one can ask the same question of philosophy as the humanities increasingly find themselves in need of defenders. Today, all living organisms discover themselves part of this Biogea. “Today we have other neighbors, constituents of the Biogea: the sea, my lover; our mother, the Earth, becomes our daughter; this beautiful breeze which inspires the spirit, a spiritual mistress; our light friends, the fresh and flowing waters.”

Genres: Philosophy, Ecology

200 pages, Paperback

First published September 9, 2010

About the author

Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and author.

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biogea is a testimonial to the sentiment of urgency that the octogenarian philosopher experienced at the start of his final decade. Central is the idea that our Western way of knowing, our brand of science, is running aground. It has turned humankind into an invasive species that risks to collapse itself in autophagy. But Biogea, the battered Earth and all its living species, is talking back. We don't yet understand its language. What we hear is pandaemonium and it fills us with terror. "Ah, who was speaking? No one and nothing of all that spoke had any meaning. Except, precisely, the invasive struggle, the threat, the fear, a rumbling whose intensity caused in us, the way the thunder or an earthquake does, an intense anxiety in the belly and the awareness that our existence, paltry, timid, fragile, could vanish at any moment." Floods, storms, vortices and quakes are protagonists in this 200-page prose poem. Biogea rages, shouts at us with primeval noise. Serres recounts colourful autobiographical stories about his face-offs, in marine and mountainous habitats, with the unchained vitality of the living Earth.

However, it wouldn't be Serres if this were a pessimistic book. This moment of panic is also an opportunity for "re-birth, co-birth, new behaviors". This is not a time to raise the drawbridge and hide behind the crumbling parapets. To the contrary, we need a peace contract with Biogea. We need to shift from parasitism to symbiosis. And we need a new science that is able to converse with the world, this riotous and communication-saturated tapestry of coded-coding things. This is a soft science, a joyful science, a science that weaves rather than separates, that is able to think totalities. "My hope rests on the contemporary evolution of knowledge. Simple and easy, our old sciences rested on the analysis that separates and cuts up, on the cutting up that separates subjects from their objects. Hate? Difficult, global and connected, the life and Earth sciences presuppose communications, interferences, translations, distributions and passages. Love?"

[Julian Alsbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I raved about this book. It’s a breath of fresh air. I did think that some analogies fell flat, for instance viewing the mountains as hard and water as soft. Ice is a rock (hard), mountains can melt (soft); their timeline is simply too incomprehensible to us, but since a theme in this book is to “think like a mountain” I felt that the comparison just didn’t work that well. Yes water will win it from rock in the short term, but both will always exist, even before the Bio. Anyhow this is probably just me being finical. I found the ending to be a bit hard to get through as it felt repetitive and a little anti-climactic. Switching from a doom-mongering old man to a hippie. In all fairness to him, I think we all do that but I don’t know how it affects the message by ending on such a joyous note.