Michel Serres: Divergences

In order to show how Michel Serres’s work diverges from traditional (modernist) Western philosophy, this article explores a multitude of texts and contexts against which Serres might be better understood. Most starkly, Serres’s work diverges from the eighteenth and nineteenth century Germanic tradition of Bildung, meaning cultivation through introspection, apolitical thought and character building through education. Serres’s moves away from ego-centric thought (or self-cultivation) to eco-centric thought more akin to what Gregory Bateson (1972) called an ecology of mind. That is, Serres’s integrates—in a more ecological fashion—poetry, science, the arts, ecology and politics to raise philosophical questions. Further, this author suggests that Serres’s reference to the nineteenth century poem Pierrot Lunaire (put to music by Arnold Schoenberg (1912)) serves as a trope for Serres’s over-arching philosophy. Pierrot is an artist, a sage, an outlier, a Hermes-like figure who breaks with tradition. Arnold Schoenberg’s (1912) atonal performance piece (Pierrot Lunaire), spoken and sung, shattered the boundaries of classical music. Like Schoenberg’s work, Serres’s work, both in style and content, shatters the boundaries of traditional philosophy. Serres’s breaks open a new paradigm in philosophy.