Michel Serres: Figures of Thought

by Christopher Watkin

Overview

Christopher Watkin provides a true overview of Serres’ thinking. Using diagrams to explain Serres’ thought, the first half of the book carefully explores Serres’ ‘global intuition’ – how he understands and engages with the world – and his ‘figures of thought’, the repeated intellectual moves that characterise his unique approach. The second half explores in detail Serres’ revolutionary contributions to the areas of language, objects and ecology. All told, Watkin shows that Michel Serres has produced a cross-disciplinary body of work that provides a crucial and as yet under-exploited reference for current debates in post-humanism, object oriented ontology, ecological thought and the environmental humanities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474405737
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	6.46(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)

About the Author

Christopher Watkin is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Monash University. His previous publications include Phenomenology or Deconstruction?, Difficult Atheism, and French Philosophy Today.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction: Michel Serres Today; Part I; 1. How Serres Thinks: Leibniz, Plato, Descartes; 2. Space and Time; 3. Serres' Style; Part II: 4. Language; 5. Objects; 6. Ecology; Envoi; Bibliography; Index.

What People are Saying About This

Chris Watkin has written a marvellously lucid and accessible guide to the prodigious work of Michel Serres. Watkin takes account expertly of the whole spread of Serres's long career and breathtakingly various oeuvre, navigating through it not by text or theme, but by 'figures of thought'. This is a brilliant device that allows him to pay attention not just to the matter of Serres's thought but also to its particoloured styles and textures.

University of Cambridge Steven Connor

Chris Watkin has written a marvellously lucid and accessible guide to the prodigious work of Michel Serres. Watkin takes account expertly of the whole spread of Serres's long career and breathtakingly various oeuvre, navigating through it not by text or theme, but by 'figures of thought'. This is a brilliant device that allows him to pay attention not just to the matter of Serres's thought but also to its particoloured styles and textures.

Joanna Hodge

This is an exceptionally lucid, detailed introduction to the disruptive thought of Michel Serres. Gone are the classic themes of subjects and objects, agency and responsibility, and in their place Serres charts the arrival of information technologies, climate catastrophe and the morphing of the human, as radically shifting structures of what Serres calls ‘hominescence’. Christopher Watkin opens his admirable account by outlining Serres’ disagreements with Descartes and Plato, and with Serres’ adaptation of Leibnizian monadology. Rethinking space and time, language, quasi-objects and a new broad scope notion of ecology fill out an intense engagement with Serres’ powerfully enabling legacy. Both general readers and specialists are in Watkin’s debt for thus providing access to the strange new world of Serresian philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

This is an exceptionally lucid, detailed introduction to the disruptive thought of Michel Serres. Gone are the classic themes of subjects and objects, agency and responsibility, and in their place Serres charts the arrival of information technologies, climate catastrophe and the morphing of the human, as radically shifting structures of what Serres calls ‘hominescence’. Christopher Watkin opens his admirable account by outlining Serres’ disagreements with Descartes and Plato, and with Serres’ adaptation of Leibnizian monadology. Rethinking space and time, language, quasi-objects and a new broad scope notion of ecology fill out an intense engagement with Serres’ powerfully enabling legacy. Both general readers and specialists are in Watkin’s debt for thus providing access to the strange new world of Serresian philosophy.

Joanna Hodge

Chris Watkin has written a marvellously lucid and accessible guide to the prodigious work of Michel Serres. Watkin takes account expertly of the whole spread of Serres's long career and breathtakingly various oeuvre, navigating through it not by text or theme, but by 'figures of thought'. This is a brilliant device that allows him to pay attention not just to the matter of Serres's thought but also to its particoloured styles and textures.

University of Cambridge Steven Connor