Michel Serres, passe-partout

Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. 204. ISBN 0-472-09548-X, £31.50, $44.50 (hardback); 0-472-06548-3, no price given (paperback).Michel Serres (ed.), A History of Scientific Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Pp. viii+760. ISBN 0-631-17739-6. £75.00, $100.00.Michel Serres is one of the best-known philosopher-critics in France, and his name is likely to draw many readers to these two books. With sales of 50,000 copies of his La Légende des anges (1993; trans., Paris, 1995), 100,000 copies of Le Contrat naturel (1990; trans., Ann Arbor, 1995) and 300,000 copies of Le Tiers-instruit (1991; trans., forthcoming), Serres's official eminence (he was elected to the Académie Française in 1990) is more than matched by contemporary popularity. Originally trained in mathematics and logic, Serres undertook doctoral research with Gaston Bachelard – and it shows. Even at his most allusive, Serres's dexterous prose often slips into neat axiomatic and Euclidean certainties, while one can see much of both his aggressively anti-epistemological stance and his easy traffic across the science–poetics divide as an effort to distance himself from his former mentor. But, like Bachelard, Serres has a commanding range, is hugely prolific and writes – if one may say this of one of the ‘Immortals’ – with a glee and innocence that one associates with the rank amateur.Serres, a professor of the history of science at the Sorbonne, is no amateur. ‘History of science’, he has said, ‘that's my trade’. So it may be, yet many, hearing of his forays into the history of angelology, the natural rights of trees, the iconography of Tintin and the moral status of airport terminals, are entitled to ask whether Serres is to be trusted. Put another way, should one take Serres seriously? The question is worth asking at the outset, for there is little more aggravating than intellectual energy and enthusiasm one feels with hindsight to have been misplaced. How many readers of Michel Foucault, one wonders, were shocked to find him saying in his last lectures that he admired Diogenes the Cynic, the shameless philosopher who masturbated in the Athenian public square, pour épater les bourgeois, so to speak? Maybe Foucault's oeuvre was a similar snub from a maître-penseur – a kind of masterpation, if you will.