Michel Serres: Figures of Thought

Description

The first full introduction to Serres, from The System of Leibniz (1968) to his final publications in 2019The first assessment of Serres’ thought as a wholeWorks from the original French to engage with the broadest range of Serres texts: both his translated works and his major untranslated worksProvides a resource for scholars in philosophy, ecology, new materialisms, literature, the history and philosophy of science and the history of ideasBrings Serres into conversation with other major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc NancyFocuses on the repeated moves that characterise Serres’ thinking, opening up his writing for scholars across disciplines and showing how his ideas can be brought to bear on new areasChristopher 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.