Michel Serres Livres

"Qui mange à table d'hôte, invité gourmand, parfois beau causeur est dit parasite. La bête petite qui vit de son hôte, qui change son état courant et le met en risque de mort, est dite, encore parasite. Le bruit qui interrompt sans cesse nos dialogues ou intercepte nos messages, voici toujours le parasite. Pourquoi nomme d'un même mot un homme, une bête et une onde? Voici un livre d'images d'abord comme réponse à la question, une galerie de portraits. Il faudra un peu deviner qui se dissimule sous les plumes et sous les poils, et sous l'accoutrement du fabuleux. Des animaux, grands et petits, mangent ensemble, leur festin est interrompu. Comment? Par qui? Pourquoi? Sortent les animaux, les repas continuent. Nous mangerons avec Jean-Jacques, avec Tartuffe, avec Socrate, avec les frères de Joseph ... Le parasite prend et ne donne rien : des mots, des bruits, du vent. L'hôte donne et ne reçoit rien. Voici la fléche simple, irréversible, sans retour, elle vole entre nous, c'est l'atome de la relation et c'est l'angle du changement. Abus avant l'usage et vol avant l'échange. On peut construire, à partir d'elle, ou repenser au moins, techniques et travaux, économie et société."--Page 4 of cover

"Nos sociétés occidentales ont déjà vécu deux révolutions : le passage de l'oral à l'écrit, puis de l'écrit à l'imprimé. Comme chacune des précédentes, la troisième, tout aussi décisive, s'accompagne de mutations politiques, sociales et cognitives. Ce sont des périodes de crises. De l'essor des nouvelles technologies, un nouvel humain est né : Michel Serres le baptise "Petite Poucette". Petite Poucette va devoir réinventer une manière de vivre ensemble, des institutions, une manière d'être et de connaître..." [Source : extrait de la 4e de couv.]

" Aller droit au but " : tel paraît être le mot d'ordre de nos sociétés modernes. A l'heure du TGV, d'Internet et du GPS, le détour est perçu comme une perte de temps, une errance inutile, voire une fuite. A bien des égards, il est pourtant essentiel à notre humaine condition. En effet, l'individu peut-il se construire et s'enrichir s'il ne sait pas s'éloigner des chemins balisés ? Le général d'armée parvient-il à tromper son adversaire s'il ne maîtrise pas la feinte ? Et l'amoureux réussit-il à séduire sans artifices ? Bien plus, peut-on apprécier la vie sans prendre le temps de goûter ses plaisirs ? Et si le détour était finalement le meilleur moyen de ne pas se perdre...

L'éditeur indique : "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."

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.

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 Médicis Essai in 1985. The Revelations edition includes an introduction by Steven Connor.

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 Récit, 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.

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.