The Troubadour of Knowledge

by Michel Serres, Sheila Faria Glaser (Translator), William Paulson (Translator)

What do we do when we raise a child, teach a student, or educate a person as a member of society? For the French philosopher Michel Serres, all of these forms of pedagogy require painful yet exhilarating departures from home and encounters with Otherness. Like a swimmer who plunges into the river's current to reach the opposite bank, the person who wishes to learn must risk a voyage from the familiar to the strange. True education, Serres writes, takes place in the fluid middle of this crossing. To be educated is to become a harlequin, a crossbreed, a hybrid of our origins--like a newborn child, complexly produced as a mixture of maternal and paternal genes, yet an independent existence, separated from the familiar and determined.

 In this wide-ranging meditation on learning and difference, Serres--the scientist turned epistemologist, philosopher turned moralist, reveler of being a half-breed from every point of view--explores numerous pathways in philosophy, science, and literature to argue that the best contemporary education requires knowledge of both science's general truths and literature's singular stories. He heralds a new pedagogy which claims that from the crossbreeding of the humanities and the sciences a new educational ideal can be born: the troubadour of knowledge.

 With his agile and poetic voice, Serres has created a meditation of precisely this pluralistic creation, deftly recognizing it as a third party bred not of orderly dialectics but of the destabilizing multiplicity of the present age. Those who know the enormous range and clarity of this thinker will welcome this latest volume translated into English by Sheila Glaser with the assistance of William Paulson.

 Michel Serres has taught at Clermont-Ferrand, the University of Paris VIII [Vincennes], the Sorbonne, and Stanford University, and has served as visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University. Other works of his available in English translation include Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (with Bruno Latour), Genesis, and The Natural Contract, also published by The University of Michigan Press.

 Sheila Glaser is Reviews Editor of Artforum magazine. William Paulson is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Education, 20th Century

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Michel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and author.

Reviews

[EB · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Universally, then, because man is nothing, he can: infinite capacity. I am no one and I am worth nothing— capable, then, of learning everything and of inventing everything, body, soul, understanding, and wisdom. Since God and man are dead, reduced to pure nothingness, their creative power is resurrected” (155).

In-between the humanities and the sciences lies what Serres calls “the third” place: this is the space we inhabit in order to invent and create. The whole book seems to come out of the third place Serres talks about, and reading it really mimics the journey he describes. I felt like as I was reading I was watching the book being invented. It has so many twists and turns into different topics and modes of thinking. (This is pretty standard in many of Serres’s books.)

What I also love about this book is the frustration it creates. In his twists and turns, Serres references so many different theories (philosophical, mathematical, scientific) and works within history that it makes it difficult to understand every single point he’s making. But I think this frustration is exactly part of the learning process that Serres advocates for. Learning isn’t about regurgitating or defining concepts. It’s subtle. It’s a process. It exists in large part outside of language.

[Joseph M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first book by Mr. Serres. I enjoyed it! Its a very skillfully written treatise on how the process of learning is about complexity and reconciliation of contrasting parts of ourselves. Living with the unsolvable and no doubt hard contradictions of our day and age: this certainly causes suffering but it also puts us in a 'third place' where joyful invention is possible. As such Serres is veery inventive, and a lot of the 'Ethics' (in the sense used by Spinoza) here are about leaving behind what stabilizes or comforts and instead seeking the unknown playfully and joyfully while knowing the real danger that comes from that. He goes into authors I really didn't know much beyond surface level about, like Prosper Merimee.
Still, Serres is a bit (to say the least) fond of using a very complex, or at least very impulsive (in the sense of raw and polemical), style. You can tell he writes from inner impulse, which is very welcome, but I would like some footnotes, references, and such. The poetic mode of language works to illustrate Serres points well enough most of the time, but a clarifying sentence or two is kind of needed in some of the more abstract passages.

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fabulous work from Serres... adore especially the places where he advocates for the use of prose or narrative to articulate elements of experience which theory simply cannot capture in its complexity... amazing mastery of language, honestly Proustian in quality which is exceptionally rare for a political theorist. The only reason I am not putting this on my favourites shelf is bc I already have two Serres books there.

"What does it matter to me to learn whence comes what I will dare to say: I am old enough, that is to say strong enough, to have the courage"

[Dullah Mirza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geser sedikit perspektif dalam kerangka berpikir kritis, And yes, things change.

[Saint Android · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's an unexpected yet beautiful section on herge , the creator of tintin

[myriam kisfaludi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Et bien, je crois que j'ai trouvé pire que Proust pour la longueur des phrases ! on comprend que l'auteur aime les mots, mais que de listes de mots et de jeux de mots! Si on ne sait pas que l'auteur est natif du Sud Ouest de la France, on peut le deviner tellement on a l'impression d'être dans une chanson de Nougaro. le sujet est pourtant très intéressant, Elever, Eduquer, Instruire : passionnant seulement la fulgurance du propos se perd dans ce charabia trop intellectuel et difficilement accessible.

[Clyde Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a dancer and educator I was particularly fond of this book. The first I read after the interviews with Latour. Easier for me to follow even though I don't know all the literary references behind most of his books.