Serres_The Science of Relations

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introduction

david webb

Serres engagement with themes such as commu-nication, science, space, time, language, singu-larity, multiplicity and technology places him atthe heart of recent European thought. Yet hiscontribution is wholly distinctive, finding new

and unusual paths between problems and intro-ducing readers to unexpected perspectives. Oneof the reasons for this lies in Serres own back-ground in mathematics and science. It was oncecommon for philosophers to begin as mathe-maticians and scientists. By contrast, today it isquite rare. But often this means only thatphilosophers, lacking experience in contempo-rary mathematical and scientific thought, remainbeholden to an ideal that mathematics andscience themselves are fast overtaking. What

Serres has drawn from his experience of mathe-matics and science is a style of thought thatdeparts from the familiar concerns of system-aticity, proof and derivation; whereas thephilosopher makes a virtue of slow analysis, thescientist searches out relations between appar-ently disparate phenomena and the mathemati-cian celebrates inventiveness and elegantsimplicity. For Serres, the activity of thought isnot essentially explanatory, it is operational,

transformative. If his work is a science of rela-tions, these relations are themselves forms ofdisplacement.

This concern is reflected in Serres abidinginterest in Leibniz, whose work he describes asoffering a general theory of relations, and incommunication, the topic of the first in the seriesof five Herms volumes that he publishedbetween 1969 and 1980 and a theme that lies atthe heart of much of his work.1 At stake here is

less a theory of linguistic relation than a generalconception of exchange that is the condition bothfor existence and for the knowledge one can haveof it. The body is a site of intensive communica-tion across membranes and through and betweenorgans and cells; the mind still more so. Society,too, exists only through such exchange. This

general sense of communication was developedvia information theory, which also confirmed forSerres that communication can only occur wherethere is a code and that codes are necessarilyexclusive. Since attempts to achieve perfecttransparency will inevitably fail, we live with theexcluded third, noise, or, as Serres presents it inone of his most well-known books, the parasite.2

Politically speaking, that perfect transparency isimpossible means that perfect equality is also

michel serres

translated by alber to toscano

THE SCIENCE OF

RELATIONS

an interview

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/03/020227-12 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors ofAngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725032000162675

A N G E LA KI journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 8 number 2 august 2003


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impossible, which underlines the seriousness ofthe question ofhow we communicate this isone reason why the issue of teaching is so impor-tant for Serres.

The themes of communication, translation,

distribution and disorder addressed in theHerms volumes received a fresh and perhapsdecisive treatment in Serres return to Lucretiusin The Birth of Physics, a text published in thesame year as Herms IV, La Distribution.3 In hisstudy of Lucretius, Serres brings together atom-ism and Archimedean mathematics to reveal arigorous science based on differential principlesand non-linearity. Atomism is shown to be atheory of flow; that is, of material communica-tion or relation. Order emerges not by design butas the outcome of regularities formed withinvortical currents and turbulent flow, which isitself the result of an uncaused deviation in thepath of atoms as they fall, the clinamen. In theLucretian universe, or multiverse, there are nouniversal laws governing the movement of atoms,beyond the principle that they find the path ofleast resistance along a descending path. Allorder, and therefore all the laws that describeorder, are local in both space and time; though

any particular configuration or world will spiralin decline towards a form of entropic death, theclinamen will always ensure fresh turbulence andthe birth of new order elsewhere, at anothertime.

For Serres, Lucretian atomism is a materialistmodel whose general principles are reiterated notonly in different worlds with different physicallaws but across difference discourses; thus moral-ity, history, linguistics and economics can all be

interpreted according to the model of non-linearflow. Since this model is not a body of universallaw, this is not reductionist. Moreover, sincescience does not abstract directly from nature,there is no epistemological barrier to its conceptsand methods appearing elsewhere; often, theywere already operative there, albeit implicitly.Abstraction, for Serres, begins not with thesubstantial objects of experience but with theprocesses by which they enter into relation withone another. Although certain forms of relationrecur, the specificity of the relations themselvesnecessarily varies from case to case and can only

be determined locally. There is therefore nouniversal logic or epistemology; only relationswhich themselves define a shifting temporal,spatial and discursive topology. Similarly, Serresdoes not regard disciplines as isolated from one

another, each with their own concepts and meth-ods, but rather approaches history as a field inwhich to explore the complex and continuallychanging terrain between science, philosophy,literature and other branches of culture.4

If Leibniz presents the world as a continuoussea in which each point communicates with everyother, Lucretius reminds us that the sea is a placeof treacherous currents whose successful naviga-tion demands local knowledge of local condi-tions.5 In a rich and mobile body of work, theymark the two tendencies whose interrelationSerres elaborates with remarkable inventionacross and between a variety of disciplines andthemes. The possibility of such inventivenesslies, he might suggest, in the very complexity ofthe relations explored, which may be understoodas a turbulent material flow in which thinkingand writing themselves participate. But toachieve it still requires a mind that is both with-out prejudice and attentive to the sense that

things bear in themselves.

notes

1 The reference to Leibniz comes from Serres and

Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time108; cf. Serres, Le Systme de Leibniz et ses modlesmathmatiques (1968) and Serres, Herms I (1969).

2 Serres, Le Parasite (1980).

3 Serres, La Naissance de la physique dans le texte

de Lucrce (1977); Herms IV, La Distribution(1977).

4 Serres, Herms V, Le Passage du nord-ouest(1980).

5 Serres, Herms II, LInterfrence 10.

science of relations

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the science of relations: an

interview1

michel serresPeter Hallward: Like many thinkers and intel-

lectuals of your generation (I have in mind

Lvi-Strauss, Foucault, Braudel, a few others)

you were deeply marked by the experience of the

war and by the unprecedented acts of violence

that accompanied it. Was your initial orienta-

tion towards mathematics, and in particular

your interest in modes of pure formalisation

(the identification of structures indifferent to

any interpretation or content) linked to this

experience in some way?

Michel Serres: It is difficult to make much of aconnection between my personal history and mycommitment to mathematics. I began with math-ematics for a simple reason: one cannot be aphilosopher without also possessing the most all-encompassing scientific background possible. Ibegan my studies with mathematics and then

moved on to physics; in the past ten years I havebeen studying biochemistry, with the aim ofacquiring a fairly ample range of scientificknowledge. Almost all philosophers wentthrough a version of such training: Aristotle,Plato, Descartes, Leibniz It is a tradition inthe history of philosophy: you cannot do philos-ophy without having a very solid and variedknowledge in the horizon of the sciences. Thisis the case with Kant, with Bergson, with Russell,

etc. In reality, mathematics is the universallanguage of the sciences hence the importanceof a mathematical apprenticeship.

This approach to philosophy has no relation tothe war. War had the contrary effect, in fact: itforced me to abandon my mathematical appren-ticeship. Hiroshima is the major event of the warbecause, for the first time, scientists found them-selves forced to pose fundamental ethical ques-tions. Many scientists of my generation leftphysics for biology, so as not to preoccupy them-selves any longer with the nuclear question thisaccounts for the explosive growth in biochem-

istry, both in Great Britain and France. I myselfturned towards philosophy in order to get out ofthe sciences.

P.H.: Braudel and Lvi-Strauss adopted a

structuralist perspective, in the broadest senseof the term, partly so as to avoid thinking

the events of the war in their immediate

historicity this wasnt the case for you?

M.S.: I do not belong to the same generation asBraudel and Lvi-Strauss when the war beganI was nine and when it ended fifteen, so it wasnot an adult experience for me. By contrast, theyhad an adult reaction to the war. This is a deci-sive gap, which was then repeated between myown generation and the next. What it generatedat the time, for example, was an overestimationof political problems, since those of the genera-tion after mine did not see, as I had, how politicscan end up in corpses and bombardments. Thatswhy my generation was less disposed to bedirectly involved in politics.

P.H.: What did you first look for in contempo-

rary mathematics, in particular with respect to

the Bourbaki group and the project of thoroughformalisation?

M.S.: In my time, there was an important scien-tific revolution, which is what confers meaningupon a changing discipline. It is when a disciplinechanges that its meaning becomes visible. Thishappened with what was called the passage fromclassical mathematics to formalist mathematics,in the manner of Bourbaki. It was a very impor-

tant stage in the ongoing reflection upon theobject and methods of mathematics. This revolu-tion changed the vantage point, or the point ofattack, of mathematics. The idea of a logicismthat took its cue from axiomatic systems wasalready well known long before the war. Here wewere dealing with a revolution that concerned thecomprehension of the very objects of mathemat-ics, a comprehension that was more set-based,more operational and more abstract. The marginof abstraction was indeed greater. It was possibleto see sets of objects all at once, as it were, ratherthan needing to describe them one by one.

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P.H.: Was it along these lines that you arrived

at your own conception of structure?

M.S.: I was not a structuralist in the same way asLvi-Strauss and Jakobson, since they were struc-

turalists in the linguistic sense of the term. I, onthe other hand, was a structuralist in the mathe-matical sense of the term. I considered it neces-sary to consider things as sets and to see whichoperations united the elements of a given set.This description could be followed by a secondone, and one could then see the analogy betweenthe two. For example, in Molires Don Juan onecan see how exchange functions in the openingscene in which Sganarelle praises tobacco, in therelations with women, in the scene with thebeggar, etc. the same operation is repeated ondifferent terrains, but each time it is the samebasic operation of exchange that takes place.2

Little by little, I abandoned this perspective,because a second mathematical revolution cameto pass: this was the information revolution, i.e.algorithms (the Turing machine). Im lucky: inmy life Ive been witness to two great mathemat-ical revolutions. I am a child of Bourbaki andTuring.

At that time, I was beginning to study physics,that is, to understand the problems regardinginformation. I was struck by the concept of back-ground noise: in any dialogue whatsoever, thereis a convention between the counterparts, whichdictates that we should struggle against the noisethat would otherwise hamper our conversation.This was a relatively novel concept of communi-cation. It was then that I parted ways, breakingwith the vulgate shared by most philosophers of

the time, which was broadly speaking a Marxistone (especially with Althusser at the coleNormale), and which sought to foreground prob-lems ofproduction. I said no, the society oftomorrow will be a society ofcommunication andnot a society of production. The problems ofproduction are virtually resolved in the West,and it is the problems of communication that willnow take centre stage.

That is why I wrote the five volumes ofHerms (the god of communication), TheParasite (the obstacle to communication), as wellas a book on angels (the messengers, the commu-

nicators). Hermes is a single operator of commu-nication, contrary to the angels, who constitute amultiplicity of operators. There is thus aconstant analysis of this phenomenon of commu-nication in my books.

P.H.: Would it be correct to say that youve

moved from a formalist conception, which

regarded itself as indifferent to all content, to

any idea of meaning or of world, towards a

conception in which, roughly speaking, form

and content partake in a unique and infinitely

polyvalent expression, a generalised communi-

cation of sorts?

M.S.: Just as the first mathematical revolutionwas a formalist one, and allowed an abstractgrasp of large sets, so the second (the algorithmicrevolution) allowed for a description of singular-ities [singularits] of some very singular things.These two revolutions are almost antinomies ofone another. Its not by accident that I workedon Leibniz, who spent his entire life trying tounite a very abstract kind of work to a greatmonadic singularity, trying to grasp the latter bythe former. The project of capturing both the

universal and the monadic singularity has alwaysprovided the horizon for my own work whencemy current preoccupation with biochemistry,which tells us that it is from the universal struc-ture of DNA that singular individuals derive.

P.H.: Despite the obviously contemporary char-

acter of your examples, is it the case that your

conception of philosophy is classical, i.e. pre-

Kantian, more or less? I mean, isnt it precisely

a neo-Leibnizian conception, in which what isat stake is grasping the world in an immediate

way, without passing through the categories of

a more or less reasoned re-presentation of the

world?

M.S.: In Herms IVthere is a piece on Kant andthe theory of the heavens where I show that Kantwas the first to think the fractal object. But weare no longer dealing with the same world. Eversince the beginning of the nineteenth century, wedo not live in the same world; the human bodyis not the same, and neither is our understanding


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of the universe and its constituents (atoms, mole-cules, cells, stars, galaxies ).

P.H.: But what of the idea that the world is the

bearer of its own intelligibility, which we can

access not because we are in a privileged positionto represent and classify objects, but because we

partake of it, because we are part of it, because

we can think it, in its very substance? That Iknow the world in the way that it knows itself?

M.S.: Yes, I do indeed think that many opera-tions of knowledge are already at work within theobjects of the world.

P.H.: Then in what sense can we say, for exam-

ple, that we are no longer dealing with the same

world as Kant?

M.S.: I dont think there is anything contradic-tory about the notion that the theory of knowl-edge I am proposing provides an account of theevolution of the object of this same knowledge.

P.H.: Does this theory still have a specific place

for hermeneutics as such? If we do in fact know

the world immediately, as it knows itself, thencan scientific explanation account for those

problems traditionally associated with the inter-

pretation of meaning?

M.S.: That is a genuine question. More andmore, the hard sciences allow singularities toappear, and they are increasingly aware of theknowledge that proliferates within each andevery singularity. For example, when I was

young it seemed that the San Andras faultclosely resembled another fault in Japan. Todaywhen one studies the San Andras fault, onediscovers a tree of fault lines that is extraordi-narily complicated, and which has nothing incommon with the fault line that runs by Tokyo.These fault lines are really very singular, veryunique. Another example: when I was young,you could find the general schema for the liveror the hip in an anatomy manual. Today, bymeans of magnetic-nuclear resonance, you canobtain an image of Peters liver when he waseighteen years old, or of Michels at seventy. A

schema that was geometric and abstract has in asense been replaced by an extremely singularimage, and all of a sudden the knowledge of theliver, for example, proliferates, along with all ofits possible singularities. This is just a single

instance of the profoundly algorithmic move-ment that today affects all the sciences; you canfind it equally in mathematics, in physics, in thework of scientists concerned with the place of thesingular in the physics of appearance [laphysique de lapparence], if you will.

Fundamentally, what is interesting inhermeneutics is finding meaning in the singular-ity of a given work. Today, in a certain way,there is indeed a rather interesting point offusion between, on the one hand, an undertakingaimed at singularity within the sciences and, onthe other, what is announced in the humanitiesthrough studies ofLe Pre Goriot or King Lear,for example. I think the effort to bring suchsingularities to light is basically shared by thesetwo intellectual enterprises.

P.H.: Can the full singularity of these various

elements be identified without referring it back

in the end (or in the beginning) to a single

absolute principle? In your writings, for exam-ple, does the singular not figure as the instance

of one or another of the various principles that

reappear systematically throughout your work,

somewhat like a mode, to use Spinozas vocabu-

lary, of an effectively absolute substance that

would express itself through communication,

turbulence, chaos, noise, and so on?

It seems to me that there are two dominant

tendencies in your philosophy, which I some-

times find difficult to reconcile. On the onehand, there is a particularising aspect, so to

speak, which insists on the contingent complica-

tion of networks, on the fundamental opacity of

every geographical or intellectual territory, on

the irreducible labour of navigating a pathbetween the various obstacles that we face in the

forest of thought hence all the work that

distinguishes your project from anything resem-

bling a Cartesian approach to philosophy. But,

on the other hand, you often refer to holistic

totalities that sometimes resemble absolute prin-

ciples of sorts. Of course, we are dealing with

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dynamic, self-differentiating principles, but the

absence of limits to their effectiveness makes

these principles de facto absolute. I have in mindthose moments in your book Genesis, for exam-ple, where the emergence of singularities seems

to issue from noise itself, where every form isnothing but an ephemeral organisation of a

more fundamental chaos. Or those moments

when the fundamental nudity of man, such as

you conceive him, as being nothing, puts him

face to face with the whole [le tout]. You say, for instance, that the relation of nothing to

everything offers up the secret of begetting, of

becoming and of time, that man is blank and

undifferentiated and for this very reason

capable of anything.3

M.S.: I am currently preoccupied with somerather anthropological problems, if you will since Im now reaching the end of my life I ammoving on to these sorts of questions. I quicklyrecognised that there is a fundamental differencebetween man and animals. There is a sort ofspecialisation in the detail of the animal organ-ism. The ape is very specialised in order maxi-mally to exploit a determinate niche, just like a

starfish or an octopus. If you compare the handto the claws of the crab or the tentacles of theoctopus, you become aware of the extremespecialisation of the animal limb when comparedto the hand. There can be no history of the crab;we are always dealing with the same operation.But we cannot say what the hand is for, andtherefore it can do anything draw a bow, playrugby, make signs, fight The hand is de-specialised.

Basically, I believe that the fundamentalconcept is that of de-differentiation. Becauseman is de-differentiated he has no niche; hisniche is the world, he has moved beyond thestage in which he exploited a specific niche. Thatis our singularity. The human singularity impliesde-differentiation. This de-differentiation isorganic, it appears long before the invention oftools, but we can only perceive its importancethanks to anthropology.

P.H.: So when you say that, on the one hand, I

am anyone, no one, empty, and, on the other,

that I am extremely complicated, a very complex

being, who has travelled a lot, lived a lot, whose

experience it would be very time consuming to

decipher or navigate are we dealing with the

same thing, the same kind of being?

M.S.: Yes, its the same thing. Its very clear thatthe more specialised an organism is, the more itseeks out a stable niche, one that would be inharmony with its specialisation. The more de-differentiation functions the more you arecompletely lost in a world in which you can haveany experience whatsoever. The hand is anextremely precise model for this situation. Thework of the hand is not over, far from it; we canstill find a thousand and one uses for this objectwhich has no function. We have no niche but theworld.

P.H.: I hope youll allow me one last variant of

this same question: what is the precise relation

between order and disorder? Often it seems that

order arises from disorder like Venus from the

waters, or like messages emerging from back-

ground noise. Elsewhere, it seems that disorder

itself is in some sense caught in what is, strictly

speaking, a primitive conflict between order anddisorder. Once again, are we dealing with an

irreducible dualism or with a dynamic, self-

differentiating unity?

M.S.: I cant answer this question without bear-ing in mind certain historical considerations,since there was a moment when, in the fields ofphysics and biology, there arose something akinto a school of thought (inaugurated in particular

by Francisco Varela) which spoke of the genera-tion of order through noise. Many people threwthemselves into this idea, but it did not bear thefruits promised at the time. In my book Genesisthere is something like an echo of this period,though I swiftly abandoned the idea wherebyorder could be born from noise once I realisedthat this theory is devoid of results or applica-tions. It revealed itself to be a sterile path. It istherefore very difficult to reply to your questionin general terms. We are beginning to under-stand certain things related to this question inbiology, or, say, physics, but we dont yet have a


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global answer. For example, those who seek tounderstand how DNA emerged from the pre-biotic soup have yet, as far as I know, to find ananswer.

P.H.: I suppose the solution would be toapproach this question in terms of time thetime of becoming, precisely, which would allow

us to think the transformation of disorder into

order?

M.S.: Exactly. That is Darwins response. It isalso Bergsons response. But ever since Darwinand Bergson, the appreciation of time haschanged. I will address this in my next book. Ineffect, neither Einstein nor Bergson possessed anadequate measure of time, whereas we do haveone now. For example, we can now say, basingourselves on almost certain evidence, that DNAbegan 3.5 billion years ago, that the earth began4.2 billion years ago and the universe 13.6, andso on Its extremely difficult to have any intu-itive picture of what is involved in such expansesof time; indeed, its not something that earlierthinkers knew anything about. I believe we mustbegin to re-think time, taking these orders of

magnitude into account. Theres a great deal atstake when we say that such and such a humangesture dates from 120 or 200 thousand yearsago, that the general organism emerged aroundsix million years ago. And what does this mean?That time is constructed out of things, that itmust be understood in terms of this real densityor expanse.

P.H.: That is precisely Bergsons intuition

that time has nothing to do with an emptyspace. Time itself is not the element in which

things come to pass, its the very passage of

things, their becoming. It is things themselves

that flow from time.

M.S.: Indeed. But neither Bergson nor Deleuzetruly anticipated the effects of this simple reflec-tion on quantity, which changes a lot of things.In your own body, for example, some of yourneurons date from eight million years ago, butsome date from the reptilian age, i.e. fromhundreds of millions of years ago; your DNA is

original with respect to that of your parents, butthe fact of DNA dates from four billion yearsago. And the atomic constituents of your bodyare thirteen billion years old.

P.H.: What then is the relationship between thisbiochemical aspect of the cognitive operation

and the act of thinking, of being conscious, of

taking decisions?

M.S.: It would be something like the differencebetween ten to the power of six and ten to thepower of minus six: it involves an incredibletime-scale. Thinking, in the sense that we discussit, as the cogito, as culturally influenced cogni-tion, etc., is relatively recent.

P.H.: To come back indirectly to my previous

question: does this reflection on temporality

separate you in some fundamental sense from

the neo-Leibnizian thinking of substantial

communication and pre-established harmony?

From a Leibnizian perspective, the complexity of

elements in their spatialisation be it physical,

geographical, cultural, etc. is perfectly

compatible with their essential isolation:

elements relate only to God, whom they express.This is surely a decisive way of resolving the

apparent tension I mentioned a moment ago,

between particular complexity, on the one hand,

and the empty or indeterminate relation of

all-and-nothing, on the other. Monads, as you

explained many years ago, are not distributed

within an empty space but are instead in God,

conceived as a spiritual place that is neither

measurable nor divisible. Behind phenomenal

[i.e. merely apparent] spatiality, real opera-tions play themselves out in the zero of the

place, in the absence of measure, of division, of

situation and of distance []. The [divine]

doublet omnipresencecopresence brings the rela-

tional path back to zero.4 But this obviously

presumes the immediacy of divine, or creative,

action. By conceiving the relation between noth-

ingness and the all through time since I am

nothing, I can become everything are yourejecting a new version of Leibnizs substantial

communication, a new version of creative

unity?

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I suppose that my question is always the

same one: in the end, are you a thinker of the

creative One, or are you instead a thinker of

creative relations?

M.S.: We live in a world of networks, in whichrelations are active and sometimes creative, andwhere, if we bracket the God hypothesis, wemust in effect navigate, as you put it. Orperhaps there could be a God-function, whichwould be a way for us to tell ourselves that some-where there exists a knowledge that wouldresolve all these questions, but which would belike an integral of which we only possess thedifferentials. Perhaps some day there will be aknowledge that will permit us to grasp thecomplexity of these relations, but there isnt onenow. In this respect, however, it is interesting tosuppose that there might be such a knowledge:one calls it God, and draws the consequences. Inany case, I think the seventeenth centurycertainly did have an idea of God of this type: theidea that there exists an integral of human think-ing, an integral of clear and distinct knowledge.

Incidentally, this is why I always askedDeleuze the following question: in what space do

you draw your plane of immanence? If there is aplane of immanence it must indeed be some-where. I got no reply. But if he wanted to saythat theres no such thing as transcendence, thenhe shouldnt have used the term plane. If youthink that only immanence exists then there is noplane; otherwise, if there is a plane it mustindeed be placed somewhere, and we must askourselves in what direction and how and sothere is a transcendence. One could say that all

of Deleuzes thought refuses this idea of tran-scendence but that its every expression presup-poses it.

P.H.: I would like to move on now to questions

of ethics or morality. You say that the moral-ity of relations is based on the science of rela-tions.5 What does this mean? Does relation as

such lead to a morality?

M.S.: Yes, relation establishes something, andits very simple. No one exists before someonehas told them I love you. Before that, he or she

has yet to exist, or has existed very little. Its anexample of how relation creates something.Relation is creative. I believe that relationprecedes being.

My great dream, my lifes dream, which

perhaps I will not have the chance to carry out,is to write a great book on prepositions, becauseprepositions describe all possible relations. Its ashame that written French has no post-positions;in spoken French one often says things like Iam for [je suis pour] or are you against? [est-ce que tu es contre?], and so on.

P.H.: But can one think the with as such, qua

pure relation, without thinking the action of

relating along with the substance of what is

related or brought together? Can we isolate

prepositions from verbs and nouns? Must we

not, by definition, think the withwith otherelements of language?

M.S.: One can do without everything but prepo-sitions. In computational linguistics, among theten most frequently used words in French, fourare prepositions (de, of, tops the list), that is,words that create relation. Now, philosophy has

only ever spoken with nouns and verbs (being,having ), but it never speaks of prepositions.The verb itself is often bare, for example inEnglish, where the verb to get does not meanvery much by itself, but where you can create getoff, get on It is the preposition that plays thedetermining role. To take means nothing: to takeoffor to take away is a different matter. Yousee, philosophy rarely or never speaks reallanguage. Its as though it always spoke in a

telegraphed language arrive tomorrow Eustonstation come take my luggage.

P.H.: Heideggers works on language, and on

being-with, did they have any value for you?

M.S.: I was so busy with sciences and techniquesthat it was very difficult to throw myself into anauthor who refused them wholesale. There aretwo kinds of philosopher: there are philosopherswho shackle you and philosophers who free you.Once you are in Hegel its very difficult tospeak otherwise than as a Hegelian, whilst with


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Leibniz you are free. Leibniz never gave memuch trouble; he is very intuitive, he throwsopen many doors and closes none. In a certainway, Heidegger is very confining. Once youfollow Heideggers reasoning you become a

Heideggerian.

P.H.: I come back to the question of a relational

morality. Im thinking, here, instinctively, of

people who developed the means to analyse or

clarify relations that otherwise (naturally)

would have remained obscure, for example, rela-

tions of domination, oppression, repression I

mean thinkers in the line of Marx, Freud,

Fanon, etc. Left to myself I tend to conceive

of relation in light of the simple assumption

that, in the midst of the systematic injustice in

which we live, every future reconciliation must

pass through a preliminary antagonism or

accusation in short, that a Desmond Tutu is

only possible after a Nelson Mandela. But you

are very distant from a conception of justice that

passes through accusation and judgment; you

insist that we are all accused and accusers,

indifferently.6 Is this really true, in the world as

it now stands?

M.S.: Very often, those who overthrow oppres-sion very quickly turn to oppression themselves.Ive had very regular experience of this.

P.H.: But what of Gandhi? Mandela? Martin

Luther King?

M.S.: To a certain extent, King, Gandhi andMandela never fought against oppression. They

lived as if oppression were not taking place at all.They were rather on my side, they were propo-nents of absolute non-violence, at least King andGandhi. They never took up arms. They neverseized the weapons of the enemy in order to over-throw him. I agree, they tried to understand rela-tion, they made accusations. But their greatsuccess lies in the fact that they tried to under-stand relation without being locked in theHegelian dialectic of master and slave, in whichthe slave only ever dreams of becoming themaster. Gandhi and King possessed a truescience of relations. Take Gandhis great speech

on salt. To have found that salt was the key tothis affair was a magnificent discovery: theEnglish are making us pay taxes for somethingthat belongs to us.

P.H.: There is also in your work a rather classi-cal insistence on moderation and restraint, on

poverty. But you dont identify very clearly the

precise mechanism of this restraint, I mean a

mechanism that might have a real impact in the

present circumstances, dominated as they are by

corporate globalisation, by the presumption that

there is no alternative to the way things are, etc.

M.S.: Most people today, faced with the power ofthe market, of globalisation, take refuge in

cultural exception. It is they who are restricted,if you will. Now, in order to attack globalisation,its far better to remain universal, to play theuniversal against globalisation. For example, theAmericans impose their system of measurement,but the only universal system is the metricsystem, because it refers to the meridian and toastronomy: this indicates how American-ledglobalisation is a form of imposed particularity.The only way to attack such globalisation is the

universal. The only effective thing is universalthought, it really is.

P.H.: One last question along these lines: it

seems to me that sometimes you affirm a sort of

ethics of genius or of heroic innovation, in

which innovative and courageous invention is

the only true intellectual act, the only act of

intelligence7 and therefore, I suppose, the

only act worthy of moral consideration. You

insist on the value of rarity. Do you conceive of

morality on the basis of whats exceptional?

M.S.: Its not a question of genius, but its truethat the only true intellectual act is to invent.Now, it is equally true that nothing works betterthan the university model: it generates honest,industrious and precise people. How old are you,Mr Hallward?

P.H.: Im 34.

M.S.: I have just one piece of advice for you: takethe university model and chuck it into the sea.

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P.H.: Its a tempting thought! And how will I

make a living?

M.S.: You can make a living by teaching, etc., butyou need to be careful that, as far as your own

thinking is concerned, youve thrown away themodel. The university model is the best possiblemodel, thats why its dangerous; the better it is,the more we must keep our distance. Why?Because it forbids invention, it forbids itabsolutely. If you invent then you will be excludedfrom the university, one way or another. Theuniversity is the great inhibitor of intelligence,precisely because it is its perfect model. Theprofessors are admirable, the cole Normale ismagnificent throw it all overboard. Because

after you reach a certain age there is only onelesson of intellectual morality, which is to forgetthis entire model as quickly as possible. I am notsaying that this is the sufficient condition forinvention, but it certainly is a necessary condition.

P.H.: And you, an honoured member of the

Acadmie Franaise, an employee of Stanford

University, doesnt your own trajectory rather

refute what youve just said?

M.S.: But I was excluded from the field of philos-ophy at your age, I was barred from teachingphilosophy. I moved to history, and taught in ahistory department my entire life. All of mybooks are outside of traditional philosophy, as theuniversity understands it.

P.H.: I move on now to my very last questions.

You edit a large and growing collection of works

of French philosophy. How do you understand

the specificity of this tradition? What makes itFrench?

M.S.: Its difficult to say, because whatever trait Ipresent, youll tell me that, yes, in England we dothat too, etc. Simply, there is an historical tradi-tion, written in this language, and not only by theFrench, but by the Swiss, the Germans (as youknow, Frederick II studied his philosophy in theFrench language), etc. There is certainly aconstant concern with science, theres always that.There is also an enduring ideal of clarity andtransparency.

What separates us from you English speakersis the status of the language. When I speak orwrite in English I have a great admiration for thislanguage, for a genuine reason, which is that Iman old sailor. When you speak English, you find

yourself adrift on an immense sea of words,tossed about by waves and fluctuations:Shakespeare is the open ocean. The Frenchlanguage is relatively small, and when you speakit you find yourself skating on an icy lake.

P.H.: Unfortunately, as soon as you begin to

speak of philosophy, the English language

becomes extremely restricted!

M.S.: So whys that? Because ones ideal of rigour

is always the reverse of the fundamental qualityof ones language. Since the English language isextraordinarily rich, when it comes to philosophyit needs to narrow itself. It becomes very analyti-cal. Whilst we, on the other hand, we need to freeourselves, because our language is frozen solid.The French language is already analytical.

P.H.: And to finish: your current projects?

M.S.: At present, Im working on all of the prob-lems of biology, of the living. I would like to endmy work with these questions oflife and anthropology. I read alot in the life sciences, I spend alot of time in biochemistry labs,its been my passion in the lastsix or seven years.

notes

1 This interview was conducted in Paris on 12

September 2002.

2 Cf. Serres, Apparition dHerms: Don Juan,

Herms I 23345.

3 Serres, Troubadour of Knowledge 47; Serres,Genesis 47.

4 Serres, Herms I 160.

5 Serres and Latour, Conversations 193.

6 Serres and Latour, Conversations 192.

7 Serres, Troubadour of Knowledge 9293.


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works by serres

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Le Systme de Leibniz et ses modles mathmatiques:toiles, schmas, points. 1968. Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, 1982.

Herms 1, La Communication. Paris: Minuit, 1969.

Herms II, LInterfrence. Paris: Minuit, 1972.

Gometrie/Algbre: leau solide le jeu du loup.

Barroco 6 (1974): 2135.

Herms III, La Traduction. Paris: Minuit, 1974.

India (the Black and the Archipelago) on Fire.

SubStance 8 (1974): 4960.

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With Franois Dagognet and Allal Sinaceur (eds.).

Cours de philosophie positive. 1975. 2 vols. ByAuguste Comte. Paris: Hermann, 1998.

Discours et parcours. Critique 31 (1975):36578.

Esthtiques sur Carpaccio. Paris: Hermann, 1975.

Feux et signaux de brume: Zola. Paris: Grasset, 1975.

Jules Vernes Strange Journeys. Trans. Maria

Malanchuk. Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 17488.

Laplace et le romantisme. Le Prromantisme:hypothque ou hypothse? Ed. Paul Viallaneix. Paris:Klincksieck, 1975. 31925.

With Franois Dagognet and Allal Sinaceur (eds.).Philosophie premire. By Auguste Comte. Paris:Hermann, 1975.

Analyse spectrale. Critique 32 (1976): 55799.

Herms IV, La Distribution. Paris: Minuit, 1977.

Michelet: The Soup. Trans. Suzanne Guerlac.

CLIO 6 (1977): 18191.

La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrce:fleuves et turbulences. Paris: Minuit, 1977. The Birthof Physics. Ed. with an introduction and annotationsby David Webb. Trans. Jack Hawkes. Manchester:

Clinamen, 2000.

Exact and Human. Trans. Winnie Woodhull and

John Mowitt. SubStance 21 (1978): 919.

The Algebra of Literature: The Wolfs Games.

Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-StructuralistCriticism. Ed. Josu V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP,

1979. 26076.Herms V, Le Passage du nord-ouest. Paris: Minuit,1980.

Le Parasite. Paris: Grasset, 1980. The Parasite.Trans. with notes by Lawrence R. Schehr.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.

Gense. Paris: Grasset, 1982. Genesis. Trans.Genevive James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: U

of Michigan P, 1995.

Hermes Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. by JosuV. Harari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1982.

The Origin of Language: Biology, Information

Theory, and Thermodynamics. Oxford LiteraryReview5.12 (1982): 11324.

Dtachement: apologue. Paris: Flammarion, 1983.Detachment. Trans. Genevive James and RaymondFederman. Athens: Ohio UP, 1989.

Rome: le livre des fondations. Paris: Grasset, 1983.

Rome: The Book of Foundations. Trans. FeliciaMcCarren. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.

Les Cinq sens. Paris: Grasset, 1985.

Corruption The Antichrist: A Chemistry of

Sensations and Ideas. Trans. Chris Bongie.

Stanford Italian Review6.12 (1986): 3152.

LHermaphrodite: Sarrasine sculpteur. Paris:Flammarion, 1987.

Statues: le second livre des fondations. Paris: Bourin,

1987.Simone Weil. Cahiers Simone Weil 11.4 (1988):29798.

(Ed.). Elments dhistoire des sciences. 1989. Paris:Larousse, 1997. A History of Scientific Thought:Elements of a History of Science. Oxford: Blackwell,1995.

Literature and the Exact Sciences. Trans.

Roxanne Lapidus. SubStance 18.2 (1989): 334.

Panoptic Theory. The Limits of Theory. Ed.Thomas M. Kavanagh. Stanford: Stanford UP,

1989. 2547.

serres

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Le Contrat naturel. Paris: Bourin, 1990. The NaturalContract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and WilliamPaulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.

Discours de rception de Michel Serres lAcadmiefranaise. Paris: Bourin, 1991.

Le Tiers-instruit. Paris: Bourin, 1991. The Troubadourof Knowledge. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser withWilliam Paulson. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,

1997.

With Bruno Latour. Eclaircissements: cinq entretiensavec Bruno Latour. Paris: Bourin, 1992.Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans.Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,

1995.

La Lgende des anges. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

Les Origines de la gometrie: tiers livre des fondations.Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

Atlas. Paris: Julliard, 1994.

loge de la philosophie en langue franaise. Paris:Fayard, 1995.

Les Messages distance. Montral: Fides, Muse dela civilisation, 1995.

La Leon de Clio.Amiti Charles Pguy: BulletindInformations et de Recherches 75 (July 1996):11422.

Nous avons perdu le monde. Zellige 2 (July1996). Available online at .

Nouvelles du monde. Paris: Flammarion, 1997.

La Rdemption du savoir. Interview conducted

by Luis Join-Lambert and Pierre Klein. QuartMonde 163 (Mar. 1997). Available online at.

Science and the Humanities: The Case ofTurner. Trans. Catherine Brown and William

Paulson. SubStance 26.2 (1997): 621.

Et al. (eds.). Le Trsor: dictionnaire des sciences.Paris: Flammarion, 1997.

(Ed.). A Visage diffrent: lalliance thrapeutiqueautour de lenfant meurtri. Paris: Hermann, 1997.

A Michel Serres Interview (parts I & II).

Interview conducted by Catherine Dale and

Gregory Adamson. The Pander 5 (spring 1998).Available online at .

Inauguration. Agen, 24 Sept. 1998. Available

online at .

With Nayla Farouki (eds.). Paysages des sciences.Paris: Pommier, 1999.

Variations sur le corps. Paris: Pommier, 1999.

Herg mon ami. Casterman, 2000.

Retour au contrat naturel. Paris: BibliothqueNationale de France, 2000.

Hominescence: essais. Paris: Pommier, 2001.

Le Virtuel est la chair mme de lhomme.

Interview conducted by Michel Alberganti. LeMonde 18 June 2001.

En amour, sommes-nous des btes? Paris: Pommier,2002.

LIncandescent. Paris: Pommier, 2003.


Michel SerresAcadmie Franaise23, quai de Conti75006 ParisFrance

Peter HallwardFrench DepartmentKings College LondonThe StrandLondon WC2R 2LSUKE-mail: [email protected]

Alberto ToscanoSociology DepartmentGoldsmiths College, University of LondonNew CrossLondon SE14 6NWUKE-mail: [email protected]

David WebbPhilosophy DepartmentStaffordshire UniversityCollege RoadStoke on TrentStaffordshire ST4 2DEUKE-mail: [email protected]

Documents

Serres_The Science of Relations