Celebrating a Master: Michel Serres

In an interview published in Configurations in 1993, Bruno Latour suggested that Michel Serres should be regarded as "the patron saint" of this journal, ¹ for no other contemporary intellectual has elaborated such a comprehensive system of thought based on the epistemological principle of communication and contamination of fields of inquiry and practice: the very principle that has inspired academic projects such as Configurations. Seven years later--and seventy years after Michel Serres was born--the journal finally pays tribute to its patron with a collection of essays in his honor.

This is not the first time such an exercise has been carried out ² (and surely it will not be the last), and I am necessarily bound to repeat what has been said several times before: that the aim of this publication is to foster new discussions about Serres's intellectual trajectory; to promote the development of serious critical evaluations of his works; and, above all, to alert new readers to the novel possibilities in writing and thinking about science, literature, and philosophy that Serres has been practicing since the publication of his first book in 1968. ³

Although for a journal like Configurations--and for us, who have had the privilege to work with Serres during his years at Stanford--it is an intellectual imperative to celebrate him with a critical publication, editing this issue has nonetheless been unsettling because it is an exercise that does not always please Serres, being at once too academic and too "parasitic." Why should we spend time and waste paper to discuss his work critically, when we could simply read it? According to Serres, no explication is required: everything we need is there, in his works. Hence, it seems we must provide a justification. The answer is straightforward: besides the obvious honorific motivation, the reason for our undertaking is that, for those engaged in the history of ideas, aesthetics, and cultural phenomena, Serres's work offers a new method of inquiry, inasmuch as he proposes a different style of thinking and writing--style as a method of seeing and understanding things. He has consistently shown how to transgress historical and disciplinary boundaries in the attempt to reconfigure the space of our knowledge through his principles of dialogues, translations, contamination, and voyages between, "toward, by, from, for" the elements of our material and mental landscapes. ⁴ While many scholars tend to take an "anorexic" approach, minimalizing the scope of their inquiry, Serres guides us through the Rabelaisian banquets of knowledge and of reality practiced by way of his topological reconfigurations of ideas, texts, theories, and temporal trajectories.

Celebrating a "maverick," as Serres has been labeled, could indeed also be seen as an opportunity for rethinking our ideas about universities and intellectual life within them. Unlike his better-known French contemporaries, Serres does not enjoy a mass following in the humanities departments in the United States. Every time he has been discussed within a North American context, the question of his failure to inspire and convince a broad audience has been raised and explanations have been proffered. ⁵ William Paulson, who addresses the problem in this volume, provides some possible answers. There is certainly a problem of style, of linguistic complexity, undertones, and ambiguities that are part of the very method Serres follows in his readings on philosophy, art, or science. Yet, this is unavoidable in any philosophical discourse: language embeds knowledge; language is a historical palimpsest that needs to be unveiled and that traces the anthropological and cultural history of its formation. Moreover, good translations are available, as well as excellent critical instruments that thoughtfully uncover these layers of complexity--Maria Assad's analysis is one instance. ⁶ Sometimes Serres's texts seem too obvious, too sound--and even then, when he adopts a fully accessible and plain language, no significant improvement in the reception of his work seems to be achieved. Perhaps, then, the problem is not Serres's language, but rather the audience's ability to read Serres...