Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent

by Michel Serres

Despite being one of France’s most enduring and popular philosophers, Branches is the first English translation of what has been identified as Michel Serres’ key text on humanism. In attempting to reconcile humanity and nature, Serres examines how human history ‘branches’ off from its origin story. Using the metaphor of a branch springing from the stem and arguing that the branch’s originality derives its format, Serres identifies dogmatic philosophy as the stem, while philosophy as the branch represents its inventive, shape-shifting, or interdisciplinary elements. In Branches, Serres provides a unique reading of the history of thought and removes the barriers between science, culture, art and religion. His fluency and this fluidity of subject matter combine here to make a book suitable for students of Continental philosophy, post-humanism, the medical humanities and philosophical science, while providing any reader with a wider understanding of the world in which they find themselves.

Genres: Philosophy

208 pages, Paperback

Published June 11, 2020

About the author

Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and author.

Reviews

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sui generis, but very powerful and rich. Metaphorical insight full of bold insights.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

At its core, Michel Serres’s Branches is a meditation on branching itself, the way novelty emerges, stabilises, and propagates across time. One can read it as a philosophy of hominisation: how the human comes into being and continually remakes itself in the interplay of format and novelty, technè and poiesis.

But Serres’s reach is broader. The lattice he unfolds is also a cosmogenesis, a general grammar of existence that binds together the inert, the living, the technological, and the immaterial. The human is only one inflection of this universal branching, poised within a grammar that structures the world itself.

This grammar takes the form of a fourfold structure refracted across four registers of tension — archetypal, logical, operative, and cosmological.

At the archetypal level, Serres stages four figures. The Father embodies format and necessity, law and discipline. The Son figures rupture and contingency, the clinamen of invention. The Daughter represents science, systematised growth, branching possibility. The Mother stands for remembrance and impossibility, the black widow binding us to language and death.

This archetypal square translates directly into the logical square of modalities: necessity, impossibility, contingency, possibility. Existence itself unfolds through these four modes, and the human subject is produced in their tension: regulated by necessity, defined by impossibility, worried by contingency, launched into possibility.

The third register is operative. Here Serres names the actions that move history forward: format (stabilising repetition), event (disruptive accident), advent (inaugurating arrival), and appareillage (the externalising of organs into tools and apparatuses). This action-square shows how novelty arises, stabilises, branches, and folds back into practice.

Finally, there is the cosmological square of states: the inert (necessity, matter), the living (mortality, finitude), the technological (contingency, exo-Darwinian invention), and the immaterial (possibility, information, code). The immaterial has a privileged place: the “advent on dove’s feet,” fragile yet transformative, mediating between nothingness and being, past and future.

These four squares are not separate but translations of one another, different registers of the same generative logic. Together they articulate Serres’s vision of both hominisation and cosmogenesis: a ceaseless modulation among constraints and ruptures, memories and inventions, deaths and futures.

So, humanity has become “a producer of contingent evolution”: capable of promoting advents, of modulating the very conditions of life. This half-mastery, scaled now to the size of the planet, cannot be evaded by retreating into a precautionary principle. It demands steering — and steering requires a new Natural Contract. Not the archaic pact of war and blood, but a covenant of tending-towards-hope.

The risk of failure is immense; the opportunity is nothing less than leaving behind the deadly genealogy of belongingness, the state that makes war and the war that makes states. In the coda, Serres names this horizon concordance:

Concordance between Jerusalem (law/narrative), Athens (logos/concept) and Rome (administration/community). Saint Paul staked out this moral possibility. He was the first philosopher to really think newness, to relinquish the archaic libido of belongingness by positing a new subjectivity: I=I, “by the grace of God, I am what I am” (1 Cor 15.10). Identity decouples from genealogical anchoring, from ethnic, legal, or administrative assignment.

There is an epistemological concordance: between the social sciences and hard sciences; between science and religion; between narrative, literature and law, and hard knowledge; also between conceptual, declarative knowledge and procedural algorithmic knowledge, between the general and the individual, the universal of the format and the universal of the branch.

There is an ontological concordance between humans and nature, understood as "things and persons to be born". Our whole existence is now consciously folded into the modal square of necessity, impossibility, contingency, possibility.

The Paulinian subject rebirths for the cybernetic age. A new kind of politics takes shape. Everyone is implicated, not only decision-makers or scientists. Serres’s wager is that a new politics is possible: an ontological concordance that binds us all into the same branching lattice, a humanity finally ready to embrace its fate as pilot (‘gubernator’) of earthly affairs, poised between risk and hope.

This book, barely 200 pages, explodes like a hand grenade of love. Serres: a paragon of humility and generosity. I am very moved to receive this gift.