The refrain that ‘to think is to invent’ echoes throughout his work. It need not be instantaneous, but ‘ertain great inventors confess to having received their definitive intuition in a single night, a week, a wonderful year’ (Serresian intuition is also ‘profound and sensible’.
In At the heyday of Althusserian hegemony at the École Normale Supérieure, Rue d’Ulm he questioned the Marxist orthodoxy of the primacy of production, convinced that the age dominated by the production of physical goods from raw materials was being eclipsed by one characterised by communication and information transfer.
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However, when he dared to suggest to the highly influential ENS tutor and Marx scholar Louis Althusser that the age of production was soon to be overtaken by that of communication, he was denounced as a fascist (As far as I can plum the depths of my own motivations, these are the factors that first drew me to Serres’s thought, that held me in its orbit, and that then stoked my determination to write a book on it, however foolhardy that may in retrospect seem. Ahead of his time. It soon became clear that this expanding catalogue of knowledge would confound even an intellect of Goethean breadth, and it stands as eloquent testimony to the unparalleled range of Serres’s thought. Intuition is not exclusively intellectual but ‘[w]hatever the activity you’re involved in, the body remains the medium of intuition, memory, knowing, working and above all invention’ (I find a rare freshness and a risky experimentation in Serres’ thought. As I write these lines I have just finished giving – Je reste pourtant, autant que je le peux, dans le langage courant, mais je l’utilise dans son ampleur’.I found your post when I was searching for a way to celebrate Michel Serres’s manner of what he recently called in Grand Libraire (France 24 TV station) “transivity,” an alternative questioning manner of reciprocity, of gifting someone without the implied exchange of give and take, transmitting something without an expectation of return.
He opposes not by attacking, but by generalising.
Ricœur argues that ‘all great philosophies […] are Serres has a similar notion that he calls a ‘global intuition’, but it stretches beyond the knowable to body forth a ‘new way of being in the world’ or ‘a different style of thinking and writing – style as a method of seeing and understanding things’. The literary scholar finds himself on unfamiliar territory with Serres’ use of the technical vocabulary of sailing, or mathematical topology.
In the course of a conversation with Bruno Latour he explains that ‘my goal is not above all to be right but, rather, to produce a global intuition, profound and sensible’ (Serresian intuition strikes the ‘first blows’ of the creative process in the arts and the inventive process in the sciences; it generates the initial hypothesis that is to be tested, or the initial way of seeing the world that is to be explored.
Philosopher Michel Serres, a well-known public intellectual in France and a Stanford professor emeritus of French, died from lung cancer on June 1 at a hospital in France. Finding himself chair of the In an age of politicised philosophy, from Sartre’s ‘engagement’ through the Marxisms of the ’68 generation and beyond, here is a thinker who rarely displays the sword-wielding, tub-thumping agonistics that characterise the ambient critical tribalism, and who abhors the political engagement common among his peers. The terms that recur in his writing—the parasite, noise, translation, Hermes—have not ossified into the sort of signature concepts that attach themselves to other philosophers, such as ‘Epicurus’s clinamen, Descartes’ piece of wax, Rousseau’s general will, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, Derrida’s deconstruction, René Girard’s mimetism, etc.’ (My fascination with Serres’s thought was further strengthened by the way in which all of life can be found on the pages of his books, and all of Serres’s own life is implicated in his philosophical commitments. Hand in hand with his embrace of precise, everyday language is an antipathy to metalanguage. From our vantage point as cross-platform media-consuming internet users, we might concede that he has a point. Throughout today I have found myself reflecting on the fascination that Serres has held for me ever since my first, felicitous encounter with his writing.I had never written a full-length academic monograph on a single thinker before I decided to embark on My first engagement with Serres’ writing came as I was researching What drew me to Serres in those early days was his account of the ‘Great Story’ of the universe branching from the Big Bang to the present day and beyond. It is significant that Serres does not encompass his thought with one or more fundamental concepts (such as ‘being’, ‘immanence’ or the ‘event’), but with a story.
Like Nietzsche’s eternal return (see LRE), an intuition is not something that can exhaustively be explained, because it explains everything else. In With qualifications in both mathematics and philosophy, Serres is that rarest of beasts: a genuinely cross-disciplinary thinker. I reproduce it here in all its centrifugal, incomplete, federating, algorithmically structured proliferation:Early in my philosophical journey I encountered a passage by Paul Ricoeur that has regularly returned to me as a yardstick for evaluating a body of philosophical work.
To read Serres is not to master Serres, and that is a good thing. This sad news comes at a moment when I am deeply immersed in Serres’ writing, putting the finishing touches to a monograph on his work. Le monde de Michel Serres, VIII:1 (1997) 83.
It need not be instantaneous, but ‘ertain great inventors confess to having received their definitive intuition in a single night, a week, a wonderful year’ (Serresian intuition is also ‘profound and sensible’. Hayles, ‘Two Voices’ 3. This is an inevitable consequence of his determination to dispense with meta-discourse.