Language, Nonlinearity, and the Problem of Evil

When engaging in a mental discourse with a text written by Michel Serres, the attentive reader becomes a participant in a deliberate play, not only on Greek and Latin words in the context of the French language, but also on their movements within a particular French writ, which thereby augments its very power of persuasion, reasoning, and elegant economy of style.

There is another linguistic play at work in Serres's writing, one that is also specific to his argumentation and hones in on the passages between English and French lexical usages and applications. I am, of course, referring to Serresian passages, fluid spaces where Hermes, the parasite, and the tiers-instruit (the instructed-middle) ¹ all give free rein to their communicative, interfering, and inventive forces. These passages procure the middle-ground (la tierce-place, le tiers-lieu) where differences and identities are unshackled from their one-to-one relationship (which presents A != non-A as always true) and instead are allowed to flow together in a viscous soup that Serres names the multiple. For the English-speaking reader, the fact that the lexicon of his own language participates now and then in the feast of the métis and his middle-position, is an unexpected but defining addition to the many layers of intellectual play that underscore Serres's discourse.

An illustration of the foregoing observation is the Ulyssean randonnée that acts as one of the major Serresian implications for the philosophy of mixed bodies in Les cinq sens. ² However, the full effect of this Homeric example is displayed only at the moment when the French randonnée is etymologically linked to the English expression "random." Not only does this link reduce the randomness of "random," on the one hand, and the goal-oriented determination of the far-flung voyage (la randonnée), on the other, but the English-speaking reader is at that moment the equal of his French counterpart when invited into the middle-place of deterministic chaos implied in Serres's complex story of Ulyssean exodic order.

Perhaps the best example of the linguistic play of French and English occurs in Genesis. ³ Through a unique reading of Honoré de Balzac's novella, The Unknown Masterpiece, Serres attempts to present an initial allegorical portrait of the multiple by reinstating and then reinventing Balzac's "la belle noiseuse." She is the nominal alter ego of Catherine Lescault, beloved model of an old, seemingly demented master painter. She is also the name that Balzac elided in the course of the numerous revisions and corrections he made in his novella. Serres resurrects the full power of "la belle noiseuse"--a name composed of two adjectives!--but can do so only by combining the meaning of the English word "noise" with its French counterpart noise [nwaz], a noun that has disappeared from modern French speech except in the idiomatic expression "chercher noise," which roughly translates into "to pick a fight." In Old French it meant quarrel, furor, noisy conflict, or altercation.

By ignoring the temporal disparity between the English and the Old French noise, Serres uncovers enough similarities and differences to spin a tale of a middle-ground where "la belle noiseuse" metamorphoses into fluid passages subtly implied in the text by bodies of water at once separating and connecting French- and English-speaking cultural worlds (the Atlantic, the British Channel, the St. Lawrence River). Out of this soup of multiple implications, a conundrum that by no flight of the imagination resembles any longer either Balzac's novella or the intended message that literary critics read into it, Serres sees "la belle noiseuse" emerging as Venus Anadyomene. She is the ever-becoming pure form that has not yet fully emerged from formlessness. She is "noisy" Aphrodite (in the double semantic sense that English and French carry in the term noise). She is the direct conceptual descendant of Hermes, who, having passed in the fluid passages of "la belle...