Michel Serres

The son of a bargeman, Serres entered France's naval academy, the École Navale, in 1949 and the École Normale Supérieure in 1952. He aggregated in 1955, having studied philosophy. He spent the next few years as a naval officer before finally receiving his doctorate (doctorat ès lettres) in 1968 from the University of Paris (with a thesis titled Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques), and began teaching in 1969 at the University of Paris I.

As a child, Serres witnessed firsthand the violence and devastation of war. "I was six for my first dead bodies," he told Bruno Latour.[5] These formative experiences led him consistently to eschew scholarship based upon models of war, suspicion, and criticism.

Over the next twenty years, Serres earned a reputation as a spell-binding lecturer and as the author of remarkably beautiful and enigmatic prose so reliant on the sonorities of French that it is considered practically untranslatable. He took as his subjects such diverse topics as the mythical Northwest Passage, the concept of the parasite, and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. More generally Serres was interested in developing a philosophy of science which does not rely on a metalanguage in which a single account of science is privileged and regarded as accurate. To do this he relied on the concept of translation between accounts rather than settling on one as authoritative. For this reason Serres has relied on the figure of Hermes (in his earlier works) and angels (in more recent studies) as messengers who translate (or map) back and forth between domains (i.e., between maps).

In 1990, Serres was elected to the Académie française, in recognition of his position as one of France's most prominent intellectuals. He was an influence on intellectuals such as Bruno Latour and Steven Connor. He served as a Professor of French at Stanford University.[6][7]

In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serres expressed interest in the emergence of a new political philosophy that addresses the digital context of the 21st century, "I think that out of this place of no law that is the Internet there will soon emerge a new law, completely different from that which organized our old metric space."[8]

Serres was a vocal enthusiast for freely accessible knowledge, especially Wikipedia.[9]

In 2012, Serres was awarded the Meister Eckhart Prize and in 2013 he was awarded the Dan David Prize. He died on 1 June 2019, at the age of 88.[10]

• Alan D. Schrift (2006), Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing.

• Media related to Michel Serres at Wikimedia Commons
• Online Collaboration regarding Serres work
• art, writing: michel serres (1995) Interview with Serres by Hari Kunzru including a brief exchange on the relationship of Serres to Deleuze.
• Steven Connor's website, with links to his writing on Serres
• (in French) Radio Interview by Robert P. Harrison
• (in French) L'Académie française
• Michel Serres talks to François-Bernard Huyghe in the Unesco Courier
• (in French) Serres speaking about wikipedia very enthusiastically
• Michel Serres, one of France's 'immortels,' tells the 'grand récit' at Stanford by Cynthia Haven, Stanford Report, May 27, 2009.
• issuu.com
• Obituary in Radical Philosophy Autumn 2019 by Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier