Michel Serres (; ; 1 September 1930 – 1 June 2019) was a French philosopher and historian of science. Member of the Académie française and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, he published more than 70 authoritative works during his lifetime in the fields of anthropology of science and technology, the philosophy of communication and digital technologies, the philosophy of education, and the philosophy of ecology. Michel Serres's work is characterized by a transversal and interdisciplinary approach, connecting hard sciences and the humanities. He developed an original and innovative line of thought that has profoundly influenced contemporary philosophy.
Early life Michel Serres was born on September 1, 1930, in Agen (France). He is the son of Jean Serres, who ran a dredging company on the Garonne River in Agen. He married in 1952 and had four children.
As a child, Serres witnessed firsthand the violence and devastation of war. "I was six for my first dead bodies," he told Bruno Latour.Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres Interviewed by Bruno Latour, University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 2. These formative experiences led him consistently to eschew a scholar career based upon models of war, suspicion, and criticism.
Education In 1947, Michel Serres obtained both the scientific baccalauréat and the literary baccalauréat at the Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux. He then enrolled there in the "maths sup" (advanced mathematics) preparatory class. In 1949, he entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949. However, he resigned from the École Navale after just one term, driven by his antimilitarist convictions, which were intensified by the horror of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He then devoted himself to university studies in mathematics at the University of Bordeaux, earning his licence (bachelor's degree) in 1950. In 1952, he successfully passed the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure, where he was ranked first. He completed his diplôme d'études supérieures on "Remarks on Certain Number Systems" and defended it in 1954 under the supervision of Gaston Bachelard. In 1955, he placed second ex aequo in the agrégation de philosophie (national competitive examination for philosophy teachers).
Naval career He spent the next two years as a naval officer. From 1956 to 1958, he completed his military service as an officer in the French Navy (Marine Nationale) and was involved in the Suez Crisis.
Academic career Serres taught philosophy from 1958 to 1968 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. There, he notably associated with Michel Foucault and Jules Vuillemin. At Clermont-Ferrand Michel Serres regularly exchanged ideas and viewpoints with Michel Foucault on themes that would later take shape in Foucault's book Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things).
At the invitation of Foucault, Serres was appointed to University of Paris VIII, where he briefly took part in the Vincennes experiment in 1968–1969. In 1968, he defended his doctoral thesis in literature (doctorat ès lettres) in 1968 from the University of Paris, titled Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (The Leibniz System and Its Mathematical Models). In 1969, he was appointed professor of History of Science at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He also taught in the United States, first at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, at the invitation of René Girard, then followed him to Stanford University, where he was appointed professor in 1984 and taught for nearly 30 years.
Later years and death He was elected to the Académie française on March 29, 1990, occupying seat no. 18, previously held by Edgar Faure. He was formally received there on January 31, 1991, by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech.
He died on 1 June 2019, at the age of 88.
Editorial activities Michel Serres participated in the re-edition of Auguste Comte's Cours of Positive Philosophy in 1975. Later, he created the “Corpus des œuvres de la philosophie en langue française” at Fayard Editions. Launched in 1984 with the support of the Centre national du livre, the collection includes 131 titles in 155 volumes, published between 1984 and 2005. The goal was to gather philosophical writings in the French language from the 16th century to the early 20th century that had not been reissued. The aim was to make known forgotten works by well-known and lesser-known authors who helped build French-language philosophy. The collection highlights the multidisciplinary nature of French-language philosophy, featuring thinkers of all kinds: atheists and abbots, scientists and theologians, progressives and conservatives. Michel Serres emphasized direct access to the texts, without commentaries. Christiane Frémont served as the editor-in-chief of this collection. A journal, Corpus, Revue de Philosophie, accompanied the collection, with 69 issues published from 1985 to 2015.
Following meetings at the Fondation des Treilles and thanks to Sophie Bancquart, Éléments d’histoire des sciences was published by Bordas in 1989. The book contains 22 chapters addressing major questions, such as: Where and when does science appear? How do we assess knowledge? It covers the thought of scholars like Archimedes, Galileo, Descartes, Darwin, Lavoisier, Mendel, or Pasteur, as well as fundamental concepts like refraction, heredity, the evolution of the Earth, vaccinations, relativity, and more.
In 1992, Sophie Bancquart and Nayla Farouki created a pocket encyclopedia series called Dominos at Flammarion. Michel Serres and Nayla Farouki directed the collection, which published 236 titles between 1993 and 2002.
In 1997, he co-directed with Nayla Farouki Le Trésor, encyclopédie et dictionnaire des sciences, to which major French scientists contributed. The initial group, later expanded, included Michel Serres, Sophie Bancquart, Nayla Farouki, Pierre Léna, Étienne Klein, and Albert Jacquard. This work provides an overview of contemporary sciences through contributions from active researchers in various fields of knowledge. Its publication offers an accessible panorama of modern science for everyone.
In the collective work À visage différent, l'alliance thérapeutique autour de l'enfant meurtri, published in 1997, Michel Serres and André-Robert Chancholle edited contributions from about fifteen personalities—psychologists, physicians, surgeons, orthodontists, and others—to address the therapeutic, moral, and social issues faced by parents of a child born with a malformation.
In 1998, Michel Serres co-founded Éditions le Pommier together with his editor at Flammarion, Sophie Bancquart. The goal was to make all fields of scientific and philosophical knowledge and reflection accessible to everyone.
The Book of Medicine, co-directed by Michel Serres and Nayla Farouki, with the collaboration of four physicians (Laurent Degos, Michel Hautecouverture, Didier Jeannin, and Christian Spadone), was published in 2001 by Éditions le Pommier. It includes 400 articles describing the human being from the physician’s perspective: body and mind, illness and health, therapies and research.
Works and philosophical journey Michel Serres' philosophy is placed under the sign of travel, among theoretical knowledge, objects of the world, and the human city. Inter-references play indefinitely between each of these three dimensions. Consequently, Michel Serres makes communication the condition for knowledge of the totality as a “superposition of non-centered networks.” It is this totality that he wants to explore in his work.
A pioneer of structuralism To explore knowledge, Michel Serres discerned, as early as 1960, the importance of the notion of structure, imported from the mathematics of the Bourbaki group: “A structure is an operational set with indefinite meaning, grouping elements in any number, whose content is not specified, and relations, in finite number, whose nature is not specified, but whose function and certain results with respect to the elements are defined.” Michel Serres is undoubtedly the first philosopher to define an explicitly structuralist global program in philosophy, in the manner of Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology. Michel Serres named his project: general theory of importation, anchored in analogical thought. Structuralism inaugurated a new era whose method Serres qualified as “loganalysis”: “On a given cultural content, whether it be God, table, or basin, an analysis is structural (and is structural only) when it makes this content appear as a model.” This content is isomorphic to a certain number of other contents. The structure is precisely what is preserved in an isomorphism between two sets. A privileged example is that of Georges Dumézil's three functions. The translation of the language of one region into that of another region is possible beyond scientific regions, the series of models is not limited to scientific knowledge, and one can find a theme already brought out in literature, in political, religious discourse, etc. One then passes from “the cultural formation named science” to the set of cultural formations. Thermodynamics, for example, is not only one of the sciences; it is what is said in all sciences: “The steam engine is no longer only what the natural sciences say (with their energetics), but also Marx with his accumulation of capital, Freud with his primary process, Nietzsche with his will to power and his eternal return, Bergson with his two sources, one hot and the other cold, and again Michelet, Turner's painting, Zola's novels, etc.”
The objective transcendental Michel Serres was struck very early on by the exclusive attention paid by philosophers to subjective analysis. He therefore distanced himself from a purely idealist approach to the transcendental (that is, what concerns the conditions of possibility of knowledge), by integrating a materiality that inscribes its conditions of existence in the world. He formulated, as early as 1960, the project of reorienting philosophical analyses toward the object. The “objective transcendental” (transcendental objectif) can be defined by the set of worldly conditions that precede and shape knowledge independently of the subject. It rests on objects of the world and technical artifacts. Instead of being solely a structure imposed by the mind, the transcendental exists in the real world itself. There are regularities, structures, codes inscribed in things themselves, which make universal knowledge possible. These objective structures are present before any human perception and enable the emergence of objective knowledge: “…where solid things, impure or pure, bear inscribed upon them an information that the entire theory contributes to decipher, where they inform one another, as once the atoms of nature expressed themselves to one another. This informal language of inter-objectivity leads us to a philosophy of nature… It is in the variation of the objects of the world, that we can rediscover everywhere the inscription, the exchange, the emission and reception, of this mute logos that is the very enigma in which we are plunged. There truly exists an objective transcendental.” As early as 1972, Michel Serres advanced the idea that producing information was not unique to humans—an idea he revisited in a speech delivered in 2013 to the Académie Française: “There exists information in general that can stabilize in a solid, since every object receives and emits, stores and processes information as well. Thus, all knowledge is a translation by which it is a matter of ‘deciphering the language of objects applied to objects, by reconstructing, when possible, this objective language.’ There exist objects, independent of us. What we can know of them depends on what they tell us.”
The collective network