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Mapping Michel Serres
"Provides an extremely valuable introduction to the work of Michel Serres for an English-speaking audience, as well as offering useful critical approaches for those already familiar with its outlines."
---Robert Harrison, Stanford University [blurb from review pending permission]
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.
---Robert Harrison, Stanford University [blurb from review pending permission]
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.
- GenresPhilosophy
272 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2005
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December 30, 2024
The title of this collection of essays on Michel Serres—whether interpreted as mapping out his thinking or presenting the philosopher as a cartographic agent—feels almost paradoxical. The map, typically a static, synoptic artifact designed to objectify, control, and serve systems of conquest and colonization, seems antithetical to Serres’ fluid, anti-codified way of thinking. Yet, in her introduction, Niran Abbas intriguingly reframes the map as an active agent that reveals “realities previously unseen or unimagined.” Let it be so.
Picture Michel Serres, then, as a wayfarer, conjuring a 21st-century intellectual and visceral landscape through his performative style of philosophizing. His work is less about description or theory than about attuning readers to a sensitivity—a sense of life’s drama, the immanent, wedded to the mixed (the métis) that harbors the nonlinear, chaotic aspects of life. Rather than a map, I would venture theater—as both space and process of performance—as a metaphor for Serres’ oeuvre. This is not a proscenium for passive spectators, but a crucible, a dynamic topological space where extremes meet. It is populated by a kaleidoscopic cast of conceptual personas (Hermes, Harlequin, the Third, the Angel, the Parasite, Little Thumbelina...) who engage with a dazzling array of motives (noise, the knot, the river, the sea, the bifurcation, the archipelago...). The play is not a rigid script but a dynamic triangulation between these personas and motives. Serres’ thought is rigorous and mystical, coming close, as a gesture, to the Platonic khôra (Valerie Burrus, in her Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things, refers to it as "ever-changing, swarming, and accessible only through oblique allusion (...) it opens time, unfolding and enfolding dissonant and looping temporalities. Constantly in motion, it is always in the middle—in the midst of becoming."
The secondary literature on Serres is relatively scant, so this collection, now already fifteen years old, is still very much worth our time. It brings Serres into resonance with his intellectual predecessors (Leibniz and Lucretius) and contemporaries (René Girard, Ilya Prigogine, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida). William Paulson’s chapter, for instance, is a highlight, offering insights from one of Serres’ key translators into English. However, Kindle readers should note that the chapters by Marjorie Perloff and Marcel Hénaff are blank, with a puzzling referral to the print version.
Finally, I was intrigued to learn that Niran Abbas, the editor of this collection, has since left academia to establish Scrumptious Bites, a California-based initiative teaching families and youth how to create healthy, budget-friendly meals. This lateral move feels deeply resonant with Serres’ ethos of fluid, interdisciplinary engagement. One imagines he would have applauded such a creative leap.
Picture Michel Serres, then, as a wayfarer, conjuring a 21st-century intellectual and visceral landscape through his performative style of philosophizing. His work is less about description or theory than about attuning readers to a sensitivity—a sense of life’s drama, the immanent, wedded to the mixed (the métis) that harbors the nonlinear, chaotic aspects of life. Rather than a map, I would venture theater—as both space and process of performance—as a metaphor for Serres’ oeuvre. This is not a proscenium for passive spectators, but a crucible, a dynamic topological space where extremes meet. It is populated by a kaleidoscopic cast of conceptual personas (Hermes, Harlequin, the Third, the Angel, the Parasite, Little Thumbelina...) who engage with a dazzling array of motives (noise, the knot, the river, the sea, the bifurcation, the archipelago...). The play is not a rigid script but a dynamic triangulation between these personas and motives. Serres’ thought is rigorous and mystical, coming close, as a gesture, to the Platonic khôra (Valerie Burrus, in her Ancient Christian Ecopoetics: Cosmologies, Saints, Things, refers to it as "ever-changing, swarming, and accessible only through oblique allusion (...) it opens time, unfolding and enfolding dissonant and looping temporalities. Constantly in motion, it is always in the middle—in the midst of becoming."
The secondary literature on Serres is relatively scant, so this collection, now already fifteen years old, is still very much worth our time. It brings Serres into resonance with his intellectual predecessors (Leibniz and Lucretius) and contemporaries (René Girard, Ilya Prigogine, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida). William Paulson’s chapter, for instance, is a highlight, offering insights from one of Serres’ key translators into English. However, Kindle readers should note that the chapters by Marjorie Perloff and Marcel Hénaff are blank, with a puzzling referral to the print version.
Finally, I was intrigued to learn that Niran Abbas, the editor of this collection, has since left academia to establish Scrumptious Bites, a California-based initiative teaching families and youth how to create healthy, budget-friendly meals. This lateral move feels deeply resonant with Serres’ ethos of fluid, interdisciplinary engagement. One imagines he would have applauded such a creative leap.
Displaying 1 of 1 review