Michel Serres
Brief description of book project
It is impossible to engage with the work of Michel Serres without being challenged by questions of limits, borders, and boundaries. This research traces Serres’s approach to these in a range of his works revolving around the history and philosophy of science, technology, art, literature, politics, and law (1969-2019), in particular in relation to geometry, topology, and the concept of entropy. These analyses emerged from the observation that Serres’s work, at first sight, has a rather reserved relation to limits. His reservations towards limits as ontological givens, as politically non-negotiable, or straightforwardly socially constructed turn out to be highly productive. This informs a Serresian philosophy of limits that takes what the philosopher calls the North-West-Passage: a route that traverses lines between the sciences and the humanities. Within French-speaking philosophy and beyond, this confirms Serres to be a crucial thinker of limits in their irreducible plural, naturalist and critical function.