The first translation of the volumes in Michel Serres' classic 'Humanism' tetralogy, this ambitious philosophical narrative explores what it means to be human. With his characteristic breadth of references including art, poetry, science, philosophy and literature, Serres paints a new picture of what it might mean to live meaningfully in contemporary society. He tells the story of humankind (from the beginning of time to the present moment) in an attempt to affirm his overriding thesis that humans and nature have always been part of the same ongoing and unfolding history. This crucial piece of posthumanist philosophical writing has never before been released in English. A masterful translation by Randolph Burks ensures the poetry and wisdom of Serres writing is preserved and his notion of what humanity is and might be is opened up to new audiences.

Michel Serres first book in his 'foundations trilogy' is all about beginnings. The beginning of Rome but also about the beginning of society, knowledge and culture. Rome is an examination of the very foundations upon which contemporary society has been built. With characteristic breadth and lyricism, Serres leads the reader on a journey from a meditation the roots of scientific knowledge to set theory and aesthetics. He explores the themes of violence, murder, sacrifice and hospitality in order to urge us to avoid the repetitive violence of founding. Rome also provides an alternative and creative reading of Livy's Ab urbe condita which sheds light on the problems of history, repetition and imitation. First published in English in 1991, re-translated and introduced in this new edition, Michel Serres' Rome is a contemporary classic which shows us how we came to live the way we do.

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion-a constant preoccupation since childhood-thereby completing Le Grand Recit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings-energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem of evil-are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into.

Despite being one of France's most enduring and popular philosophers, Branches is the first English translation of what has been identified as Michel Serres' key text on humanism. In attempting to reconcile humanity and nature, Serres examines how human history 'branches' off from its origin story. Using the metaphor of a branch springing from the stem and arguing that the branch's originality derives its format, Serres identifies dogmatic philosophy as the stem, while philosophy as the branch represents its inventive, shape-shifting, or interdisciplinary elements. In Branches, Serres provides a unique reading of the history of thought and removes the barriers between science, culture, art and religion. His fluency and this fluidity of subject matter combine here to make a book suitable for students of Continental philosophy, post-humanism, the medical humanities and philosophical science, while providing any reader with a wider understanding of the world in which they find themselves.

The title of this timely and thought-provoking book, a French bestseller, refers to schoolgirls sending text messages to their friends on their smart phones. Michel Serres, one of France's most important living intellectuals, uses this image to get at something far broader: that humans are formed and shaped by technologies, and that with the advent of computers, smart phones, and the Internet, a new human is being born. These new humans beings are our children-thumbelina (petite poucette) and tom thumb (petit poucet)-but technologies have been changing so fast that parents scarcely know their children. Serres documents this cultural revolution, arguing that there have been several similar revolutions in the past: from oral cultures to cultures focused on reading and writing; the advent of the printing press; and now the complex changes brought about by the new information technologies-changes that are taking place at an accelerated pace and that affect us all.

Available for the first time in English! Winner of the Prix Medicis Essai! Marginalized by the scientific age with its metaphysical and philosophical systems, the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. Exploring the deleterious effects of the systematic downgrading of the senses in Western philosophy, Michel Serres - a member of the Academie Francaise and one of France's leading philosophers - traces a topology of human perception. Writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?

With this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion-a constant preoccupation since childhood-thereby completing Le Grand Recit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings-energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem of evil-are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into.

In this first English translation of one of his most important works, " Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, "Michel Henry""presents a statue as more than a static entity. A statue for Serres is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Through his prescient analysis of statues and how we create and respond to art, Henry demonstrates how sacrificial art founded society and through this reflects on the centrality of death and the dead body to the human condition.Approaching the problem from multiple angles, Serres comments on Verne's "Around the Moon," Rodin's "The Gates of Hell," the Eiffel Tower, cemeteries, short stories by Maupassant, fables by La Fontaine, clothing and the paintings of Carpaccio, the Challenger disaster and Baal. Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, "Statues" does not follow a linear time sequence but rather plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways.Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, "Statues" contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.

For the first time in English, the introductory volume in a major French philosopher’s groundbreaking series of poetic transdisciplinary works   Michel Serres is recognized as one of the giants of postwar French philosophy of knowledge, along with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilbert Simondon. His early five-volume series Hermes, which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, was an intellectual supernova in its proposition that culture and science shared the same mythic and narrative structures. Hermes I: Communication marks the start of a major publishing endeavor to introduce this foundational series into English.    Building on the figure of the Greek god Hermes, who presides over the realms of communication and interpretation, Hermes I embarks on a reflection concerning the history of mathematics via Descartes and Leibniz and culminates by way of a Bachelardian logoanalytic reading of Homer, Dumas, Molière, Verne, and the story of Cinderella. We observe a singular poetic philosopher seeking to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and the sciences through a profound mathematical and poetic fable regarding information theory, history, and art, establishing a new way to think about the production of knowledge during the late twentieth century. In these pages, students and scholars of philosophy will discover an extraordinary project of thought as vital to critical reflection today as it was fifty years ago.

The Birth of Physics represents a foundational work in the development of chaos theory from one of the world's most influential living theorists, Michel Serres. Focussing on the largest text still intact to reach us from the Atomists - Lucretius' De Rerum Natura - Serres mobilises everything we know about the related scientific work of the time (Archemides, Epicurus et al) in order to demand a complete reappraisal of the legacy. Crucial to his reconception of the Atomists' thought is a recognition that their model of atomic matter is essentially a fluid one - they are describing the actions of turbulence, which impacts our understanding of the recent disciplines of chaos and complexity. It explains the continuing presence of Lucretius in the work of such scientific giants as Nobel Laureates Schroedinger and Prigogine. This book is truly a landmark in the study of ancient physics and has been enormously influential on work in the area, amongst other things stimulating a more general rebirth of philosophical interest in the ancients.

According to Michel Serres, a process of 'hominescence' has taken place throughout human history. Hominescence can be described as a type of adolescence; humanity in a state of growing, a state of constant change, on the threshold of something unpredictable. We are destined never to be the same again but what does the future hold? In this innovative and passionately original work of philosophy, Serres describes the future of man as an adolescence, transitioning from childhood to adulthood, or luminescence, when a dark body becomes light. After considering the radical changes that humanity has experienced over the last fifty years, Serres analyzes the new relationship that man has with diverse concepts, like the dead, his own body, agriculture, and new communication networks. He alerts us to the consequences of these changes, particularly on the danger of growing inequalities between rich and poor countries. Should we rejoice in the future, ignore it, or even dread it? Unlike other philosophies that preach doom and gloom, Hominescence calls for us to anticipate the uncertain light of the future.

What do we do when we raise a child, teach a student, or educate a person as a member of society? For the French philosopher Michel Serres, all of these forms of pedagogy require painful yet exhilarating departures from home and encounters with Otherness. Like a swimmer who plunges into the river's current to reach the opposite bank, the person who wishes to learn must risk a voyage from the familiar to the strange. True education, Serres writes, takes place in the fluid middle of this crossing. To be educated is to become a harlequin, a crossbreed, a hybrid of our origins - like a newborn child, complexly produced as a mixture of maternal and paternal genes, yet an independent existence, separated from the familiar and determined. In this wide-ranging meditation on learning and difference, Serres - the scientist turned epistemologist, philosopher turned moralist, reveler of being a half-breed from every point of view - explores numerous pathways in philosophy, science, and literature to argue that the best contemporary education requires knowledge of both science's general truths and literature's singular stories. He heralds a new pedagogy which claims that from the crossbreeding of the humanities and the sciences a new educational ideal can be born: the troubadour of knowledge. With his agile and poetic voice, Serres has created a meditation of precisely this pluralistic creation, deftly recognizing it as a third party bred not of orderly dialectics but of the destabilizing multiplicity of the present age. Those who know the enormous range and clarity of this thinker will welcome this latest volume translated into English by Sheila Glaser with the assistance of William Paulson.

Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick — a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays. Serres begins by discussing the intellectual context and historical events — including the impact of World War II and Hiroshima, which for him marked the beginning of science's ascendancy over the humanities--that shaped his own philosophical outlook and led him to his lifelong mission of bringing together the texts of the humanities and the conceptual revolutions of modern science. He then confronts the major difficulties encountered by his readers: his methodology, his mathematician's fondness for "shortcuts" in argument, and his criteria for juxtaposing disparate elements from different epochs and cultures in extraordinary combinations. Finally, he discusses his ethic for the modern age--a time when scientific advances have replaced the natural necessities of disease and disaster with humankind's frightening new responsibility for vital things formerly beyond its control. In the course of these conversations Serres revisits and illuminates many of his themes: the chaotic nature of knowledge, the need for connections between science and the humanities, the futility of traditional criticism, and what he calls his "philosophy of prepositions"—an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions. For readers familiar with Serres's works as well as for the uninitiated, Conversations on a Life in Philosophy provides fascinating insights into the mind of this appealing, innovative and ardent thinker.

In this highly original and provocative book, Michel Serres reflects on the relation between nature and culture and analyzes the origins of the world's contemporary environmental problems. He does so through the surprising proposition that our cleanliness is our dirt. While all living beings pollute to lay claim to their habitat, humans have multiplied pollution's effects catastrophically since the Industrial Revolution through the economic system's mode of appropriation and its emphasis on mindless growth. He warns that while we can measure what he calls "hard pollution"--the poisoning of the Earth--we ignore at our peril the disastrous impact of the "soft pollution" created by sound and images on our psyches. Sounding the alarm that the planet is heading for disaster, Serres proposes that humanity should stop trying to "own" the world and become "renters." Building on his earlier work, especially that on hominization, he urges us to establish a "natural contract" with nature.
Published with the assistance of the Edgar M. Kahn Memorial Fund.

Influential philosopher Michel Serres's foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres's arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue--creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought. Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including "Genesis." Lawrence R. Schehr is professor of French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include "Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal "(Minnesota, 2003).

According to Michel Serres, a process of 'hominescence' has taken place throughout human history. Hominescence can be described as a type of adolescence; humanity in a state of growing, a state of constant change, on the threshold of something unpredictable. We are destined never to be the same again but what does the future hold? In this innovative and passionately original work of philosophy, Serres describes the future of man as an adolescence, transitioning from childhood to adulthood, or luminescence, when a dark body becomes light. After considering the radical changes that humanity has experienced over the last fifty years, Serres analyzes the new relationship that man has with diverse concepts, like the dead, his own body, agriculture, and new communication networks. He alerts us to the consequences of these changes, particularly on the danger of growing inequalities between rich and poor countries. Should we rejoice in the future, ignore it, or even dread it? Unlike other philosophies that preach doom and gloom, Hominescence calls for us to anticipate the uncertain light of the future.

Biogea is a mixture of poetry, philosophy, science, and biography exemplary of the style that has made Michel Serres one of the most extraordinary thinkers of his age. His philosophical and poetic inquiry sings in praise of earth and life, what he names singularly as Biogea. In these times when species are disappearing, when catastrophic events such as earthquakes and tsunamis impale the earth, Serres wonders if anyone "worries about the death pangs of the rivers." And for Serres, one can ask the same question of philosophy as the humanities increasingly find themselves in need of defenders. Today, all living organisms discover themselves part of this Biogea. "Today we have other neighbors, constituents of the Biogea: the sea, my lover; our mother, the Earth, becomes our daughter; this beautiful breeze which inspires the spirit, a spiritual mistress; our light friends, the fresh and flowing waters."

Marginalized by the scientific age the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. With The Five Senses Serres traces a topology of human perception, writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could? The book won the inaugural Prix Medicis Essai in 1985. The Revelations edition includes an introduction by Steven Connor.

This English translation of Michel Serres' 1982 book Genese captures in lucid prose the startling breadth and depth of his thinking, as he probes the relations between order, disorder, knowledge, anxiety, and violence. Written in a unique blend of scientific discourse and lyrical outburst, classical philosophical idiom and conversational intimacy, by turns angry, playful, refined or discordant, Genesis is an attempt to think outside of metaphysical categories of unity or rational order and to make us hear--through both its content and form--the "noise," the "sound and the fury," that are the background of life and thought. Serres draws on a vast knowledge of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, classical history, music, theology, art history, information theory, physics, biology, dance and athletics, and Western metaphysics, and a range of cultural material that includes the writings of Plato, Kant, August Comte, Balzac, and Shakespeare, to name a few. He argues that although philosophy has been instrumental in the past in establishing laws of logic and rationality that have been crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the most pressing tasks of thought today is to recognize that such pockets of unity are islands of order in a sea of multiplicity--a sea which cannot really be conceived, but which perhaps can still be sensed, felt, and heard raging in chaos beneath the momentary crests of order imposed by human civilization. Philosophy of science or prose poetry, a classical meditation on metaphysics or a stream-of-consciousness polemic and veiled invective, Serres mounts a quirky, at times rhapsodical, but above all a "noisy" critique of traditional and current models in social theory, historiography, and aesthetics. The result is a work that is at once provocative, poetic, deeply personal, and ultimately religious--an apocalyptic call for the rebirth of philosophy as the art of thinking the unthinkable.

Despite being one of France's most enduring and popular philosophers, Branches is the first English translation of what has been identified as Michel Serres' key text on humanism. In attempting to reconcile humanity and nature, Serres examines how human history 'branches' off from its origin story. Using the metaphor of a branch springing from the stem and arguing that the branch's originality derives its format, Serres identifies dogmatic philosophy as the stem, while philosophy as the branch represents its inventive, shape-shifting, or interdisciplinary elements. In Branches, Serres provides a unique reading of the history of thought and removes the barriers between science, culture, art and religion. His fluency and this fluidity of subject matter combine here to make a book suitable for students of Continental philosophy, post-humanism, the medical humanities and philosophical science, while providing any reader with a wider understanding of the world in which they find themselves.

For the first time in English, the introductory volume in a major French philosopher’s groundbreaking series of poetic transdisciplinary works   Michel Serres is recognized as one of the giants of postwar French philosophy of knowledge, along with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilbert Simondon. His early five-volume series Hermes, which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, was an intellectual supernova in its proposition that culture and science shared the same mythic and narrative structures. Hermes I: Communication marks the start of a major publishing endeavor to introduce this foundational series into English.    Building on the figure of the Greek god Hermes, who presides over the realms of communication and interpretation, Hermes I embarks on a reflection concerning the history of mathematics via Descartes and Leibniz and culminates by way of a Bachelardian logoanalytic reading of Homer, Dumas, Molière, Verne, and the story of Cinderella. We observe a singular poetic philosopher seeking to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and the sciences through a profound mathematical and poetic fable regarding information theory, history, and art, establishing a new way to think about the production of knowledge during the late twentieth century. In these pages, students and scholars of philosophy will discover an extraordinary project of thought as vital to critical reflection today as it was fifty years ago.

For Michel Serres, economic crises are earthquakes caused by societal tectonic plates. The current crisis erupted because of the widening discrepancy between major social changes and institutions that have remained the same since WWII. Serres, one of the first to bring nature into the political, writes, "To destroy, kill, exploit is worthless. In the long run, it means destroying ourselves." At a time when the world population has grown so much that it is exhausting natural resources and the environment, we need to rethink cultural, social, and political dynamics. Serres argues that geopolitics and economics will no longer be a two-player game, between West and East, for example, but a three-player one, in which is Earth will be the third partner. This book is one of hope as it calls for a new world and extols the importance of science for our future and political institutions. Here, Serres demonstrates an optimistic outlook in a clear and luminous language that offers new paths for reflection and, ultimately, a better life for Earth and its inhabitants.

The Birth of Physics represents a foundational work in the development of chaos theory from one of the world's most influential living theorists, Michel Serres. Focussing on the largest text still intact to reach us from the Atomists - Lucretius' De Rerum Natura - Serres mobilises everything we know about the related scientific work of the time (Archemides, Epicurus et al) in order to demand a complete reappraisal of the legacy. Crucial to his reconception of the Atomists' thought is a recognition that their model of atomic matter is essentially a fluid one - they are describing the actions of turbulence, which impacts our understanding of the recent disciplines of chaos and complexity. It explains the continuing presence of Lucretius in the work of such scientific giants as Nobel Laureates Schroedinger and Prigogine. This book is truly a landmark in the study of ancient physics and has been enormously influential on work in the area, amongst other things stimulating a more general rebirth of philosophical interest in the ancients.

World-renowned philosopher, Michel Serres writes a text in praise of the body and movement, in praise of teachers of physical education, coaches, mountain guides, athletes, dancers, mimes, clowns, artisans, and artists. This work describes the variations, the admirable metamorphoses that the body can accomplish. While animals lack such a variety of gestures, postures, and movements, the fluidity of the human body mimics the leisure of living beings and things; what's more, it creates signs. Already here, within its movements and metamorphoses, the mind is born. The five senses are not the only source of knowledge: it emerges, in large part, from the imitations the plasticity of the body allows. In it, with it, by it knowledge begins.