The Encyclopedic Philosophy of Michel Serres: Writing the Modern World and Anticipating the Future by Keith Moser (review)

Despite a voluminous bibliography over the past thirty years, Michel Serres does not appear to have the same currency in intellectual discourse in France and abroad as his near-contemporaries Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, nor indeed many later figures such as Alain Badiou or Jacques Rancière. In this wide-ranging and provocative book Keith Moser proposes that one of the reasons for this lies in the ‘encyclopedic’ or ‘panoptic’ nature and style of Serres’s thinking and writing (p. 12). For Moser, Serres’s approach predates the kinds of over-specialization that have become the ‘university paradigm’ (p. 10). Serres’s panopticism and the variations of his subject matter, as discussed by Moser, are, in effect, productively unfamiliar. While his early work on information exchange and networks as the modern paradigm (in the series of books published under the generic title Hermès) parallels the arguably more accessible and better-known post-Marxist work of Jean Baudrillard on the primacy of symbolic exchange over production, Serres is distinct from Baudrillard, Moser suggests, through his fundamental ‘eco-centrism’ or his focus on ‘biosemiotics’ (pp. 45 and 47). Baudrillard’s anthropocentric pessimism contrasts with Serres’s work on the forms of information exchange that operate in living matter as such, and Serres is more optimistic about the future possibilities or emancipatory uses of the very technologies that sustain alienation. Serres’s concern with the eco-sphere, and with the ‘exo-Darwinian’ evolution of humanity (evolution outside the organism, p. 105), endowing it with potentially catastrophic means, also resonate, albeit discordantly, with the work of Bernard Stiegler (for example, in La Technique et le temps, i: La Faute d’Épithémée (Paris: Galilée, 1994)). This latter is rather surprisingly absent from Moser’s frame of reference, particularly given Serres’s focus in Statues (1989) on the ambivalent etymology of the word pharmacie—both cure and poison (a major motif in Stiegler’s work)—and recent dialogue between the two thinkers. A plausible reason for this absence, and for the difference of Serres’s style of thinking, may lie in its apparent difference from the post-Heideggerian idiom that has been a dominant strand in French thought since 1945. On the other hand, there are clear echoes between Heidegger’s later critique of humanism and Serres’s concern with what he calls ‘hominescence’ (p. 102), an evolutionary stage now reached where human survival has become dependent on the evolution and control of its tools. These resonances and divergences point to the importance of Serres and the necessity of a fuller evaluation of his work. Moser’s book is a contribution to this, both in terms of its generally elucidatory purpose and its strong advocacy of Serres as a thinker whose ‘prophetic’ (p. 8) and encyclopaedic thought is essential to the contemporary moment. It might be added, however, that Moser’s very enthusiasm for Serres seems to have prevented a fuller engagement with contemporary thinkers with whom Serres himself has collaborated, such as Bruno Latour (see Éclaircissements: cinq entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris: Flammarion, 1994)).