Le gaucher boiteux par Michel Serres (review)

acerbic rhetoric of the Front national. Now that the colonial legacy has penetrated the mainstream, Ruscio sees an opportunity to“débloquer l’histoire,”a process that could enable French society to be free from the demons of its past. University of Maryland, Baltimore County Zakaria Fatih Serres, Michel. Le gaucher boiteux. Paris: Pommier, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7465-0695-5. Pp. 280. 22 a. Despite the potentially misleading nature of its rather peculiar and comical title, this book is one of the most rigorous and thought-provoking essays that Serres has written during the latter part of his career. In this sequel to his most commercially successful work Petite poucette (2012), which landed the philosopher on the bestseller list in France, Serres probes the conditions that facilitate invention. As the aforementioned title unequivocally suggests, Serres posits that one serendipitously stumbles across or discovers novelty when straying from the well-worn epistemological paths that stifle innovation. For Serres, every great feat of human ingenuity has always been the result of a bifurcation that eventually led to unexpected and unpredictable discoveries. The philosopher maintains that the process of knowledge formation is a journey whose final destination cannot be entirely predicted from the outset.As in Le tiers-instruit and other texts, Serres also outlines his encyclopedic conception of wisdom that entails weaving connections between different ways of knowing. For those who are familiar with Serres’s vast œuvre, the philosopher covers some familiar ground in Le gaucher boiteux. One of the most salient features of this essay is the litany of direct intertextual, or rather “autotextual” references, that Serres makes to his earlier works. The purpose of these mise en abîme techniques soon becomes apparent. In Le gaucher boiteux, Serres attempts to link together all the interdisciplinary theories that he has been honing for nearly half a century. The philosopher’s overview of the philosophical importance of the archetypical characters that have fueled his imagination, such as Hermès,Pantope,Le tiers-instruit,Atlas,Le parasite,L’hominescent,L’incandescent, Arlequin, and Petite poucette, illustrates that these artistic creations are all a reflection of the same cohesive, ecocentric worldview that Serres has been articulating since 1968. Moreover, this self-referentiality is an apology in the classical sense of the term aimed at silencing the philosopher’s many detractors who lashed out at him after the publication of Petite poucette. To those who have dismissed his philosophy as being too “literary” to be taken seriously by the mainstream philosophical community, Serres points out that the disciplinary boundaries between literature and philosophy have always been fuzzy at best in the French tradition. Noting that many other respected philosophers before him have conceived literary characters to explain the paradoxes and nuances of complex philosophical issues, Serres reveals,“la philosophie de langue française pullule ainsi de personnages, du Malin Génie à l’Ego cartésiens, de Zadig à 226 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 227 Jacques le Fataliste” (42). For those who are well-versed in Serresian philosophy, Le gaucher boiteux still has a lot to offer. It is in this text that Serres fully develops his biosemiotic vision of communication. This new essay makes an invaluable contribution to the emerging cross-disciplinary field of biosemiotics. The rigorous nature of Serres’s biosemiotic, communicative theories demonstrates that his philosophy is just as bold and cutting-edge as it has always been. Mississippi State University Keith Moser Tackett, Timothy. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-674-73655-9. Pp. 463. $35. The bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 provoked considerable debate among historians as well as the general public about how to consider the Terror: as a violent but inevitable aberration in the glorious narrative of the emancipation of the French people under the aegis of Enlightenment ideals of freedom and democracy,or as an integral part of a revolutionary dialectic that also drew on the Enlightenment ideals of absolute equality fostered by Rousseau’s most notorious disciple,Robespierre?Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton had asked the same question back in 1983, inviting spectators to move beyond the inevitably reductionist framework of conventional wisdom...