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Genesis
This English translation of Michel Serres' 1982 book Genèse captures in lucid prose the startling breadth and depth of his thinking, as he probes the relations between order, disorder, knowledge, anxiety, and violence. Written in a unique blend of scientific discourse and lyrical outburst, classical philosophical idiom and conversational intimacy, by turns angry, playful, refined or discordant, Genesis is an attempt to think outside of metaphysical categories of unity or rational order and to make us hear--through both its content and form--the "noise," the "sound and the fury," that are the background of life and thought.
Serres draws on a vast knowledge of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, classical history, music, theology, art history, information theory, physics, biology, dance and athletics, and Western metaphysics, and a range of cultural material that includes the writings of Plato, Kant, August Comte, Balzac, and Shakespeare, to name a few. He argues that although philosophy has been instrumental in the past in establishing laws of logic and rationality that have been crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the most pressing tasks of thought today is to recognize that such pockets of unity are islands of order in a sea of multiplicity--a sea which cannot really be conceived, but which perhaps can still be sensed, felt, and heard raging in chaos beneath the momentary crests of order imposed by human civilization.
Philosophy of science or prose poetry, a classical meditation on metaphysics or a stream-of-consciousness polemic and veiled invective, Serres mounts a quirky, at times rhapsodical, but above all a "noisy" critique of traditional and current models in social theory, historiography, and aesthetics. The result is a work that is at once provocative, poetic, deeply personal, and ultimately religious--an apocalyptic call for the rebirth of philosophy as the art of thinking the unthinkable.
About the
"An intensely beautiful and rigourous meditation on the birth of forms amid chaos and multiplicity from a major philosopher who is also an exquisite craftsman of the written word." --William Paulson, University of Michigan
"Serres exhibits a rare, raw tendentiousness refreshing in its vitriol . . . it's the sort of light-hearted, perverse, and basically liberal tirade one hears too infrequently of late." -- Word
Serres draws on a vast knowledge of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, classical history, music, theology, art history, information theory, physics, biology, dance and athletics, and Western metaphysics, and a range of cultural material that includes the writings of Plato, Kant, August Comte, Balzac, and Shakespeare, to name a few. He argues that although philosophy has been instrumental in the past in establishing laws of logic and rationality that have been crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the most pressing tasks of thought today is to recognize that such pockets of unity are islands of order in a sea of multiplicity--a sea which cannot really be conceived, but which perhaps can still be sensed, felt, and heard raging in chaos beneath the momentary crests of order imposed by human civilization.
Philosophy of science or prose poetry, a classical meditation on metaphysics or a stream-of-consciousness polemic and veiled invective, Serres mounts a quirky, at times rhapsodical, but above all a "noisy" critique of traditional and current models in social theory, historiography, and aesthetics. The result is a work that is at once provocative, poetic, deeply personal, and ultimately religious--an apocalyptic call for the rebirth of philosophy as the art of thinking the unthinkable.
About the
"An intensely beautiful and rigourous meditation on the birth of forms amid chaos and multiplicity from a major philosopher who is also an exquisite craftsman of the written word." --William Paulson, University of Michigan
"Serres exhibits a rare, raw tendentiousness refreshing in its vitriol . . . it's the sort of light-hearted, perverse, and basically liberal tirade one hears too infrequently of late." -- Word
152 pages, Paperback
First published January 13, 1982
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336 people want to read
About the author
Michel Serres
188 books213 followersMichel Serres was a French philosopher, theorist and author.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 14, 2021
It has taken me many years to approach Michel Serres. This book has been in my hands more times than I can remember. Invariably I ran aground in the non-linearity of Serres' argument, the allusiveness of his poetics, the profusion of metaphor, the obscurity of the overall aim of the book. And yet, it keeps pulling me in. I feel that I'm getting more out of it in every reading. In that sense, rereading Michel Serres is rewarding.
Here I'll recapture only one of the narrative lines in 'Genesis', which, as much else of Serres' work, cannot be summarised. As the title suggests this book aims to be an exploration of time, of beginnings. Serres' daring inquiry centers on the phenomenon of 'noise'. The background noise of the sea. For Serres, noise is metaphysical; it is the ground of our being, it is the archè. Noise is not a phenomenon itself, but every phenomenon is separated from it, like a silhouette on a backdrop. We can hear noise as a 2-dimensional projection of the truly oceanic, something that we as human beings cannot fathom. The truly oceanic is the multiple, the set of all possibles. Serres: " ... it is the very reverse of power, rather it is capaciousness. (...) We cannot predict what will be born from it. We cannot know what is in it, here or there. No one knows, no one has ever known, no one will ever know how a possible coexists with a possible, and perhaps it coexists through a relationship of possibility." However, we are unable to live in a world of pure multiplicity. Hence we have learned to make use of concepts to cut it up and shelter it in a highly dispersed way.
Serres wants to make a regressive movement: "I'm trying to think the multiple as such, to let it waft along without arresting it through unity, to let it go, as it is, at its own pace. A thousand slack algaes at the bottom of the sea." Hearing, listening, is his model of understanding. Hearing stays glued to the noise. "It is still active and deep when our gaze has gone hazy or gone to sleep." In order to coax fleeting form from the vast generative potential that is life one must labor "in this sheer sheeting cascade (...) one must swim in language and sink, as though lost, in its noise." Distance reduces to zero. Or quasi to zero. It can't be zero because then we drown in the oceanic, we are shot through with sound and fury. As we listen to its two-dimensional projection as white noise there is nothing to hold on to. We need a perturbation, a minimal differentiation, an other, an écart, an echo to gain a foothold. "In the beginning is the echo. Everything begins at the threshold of the echo." Echo. Statistically speaking a 'redundancy'. In the world of beings: a recognition of our presence in someone's mirror.
What leads us to it? From what disposition are we able to pick up this 'perturbation'? Serres asserts that our ability to let form emerge from potential, to make change blossom "would tell ultimately, would tell above all the simple happiness of living as a commonality in the heart of a city, the subtle pleasure of inventing, within the plurality, one's own conduct, one's own language, one's own individual work and private existence, one's body itself." Western culture is intoxicated by its capacity to rationalise and to 'speak'. There are few philosophers who have taken listening seriously. Serres is one of them; he glues us with our ear to the background noise of the sea.
Here I'll recapture only one of the narrative lines in 'Genesis', which, as much else of Serres' work, cannot be summarised. As the title suggests this book aims to be an exploration of time, of beginnings. Serres' daring inquiry centers on the phenomenon of 'noise'. The background noise of the sea. For Serres, noise is metaphysical; it is the ground of our being, it is the archè. Noise is not a phenomenon itself, but every phenomenon is separated from it, like a silhouette on a backdrop. We can hear noise as a 2-dimensional projection of the truly oceanic, something that we as human beings cannot fathom. The truly oceanic is the multiple, the set of all possibles. Serres: " ... it is the very reverse of power, rather it is capaciousness. (...) We cannot predict what will be born from it. We cannot know what is in it, here or there. No one knows, no one has ever known, no one will ever know how a possible coexists with a possible, and perhaps it coexists through a relationship of possibility." However, we are unable to live in a world of pure multiplicity. Hence we have learned to make use of concepts to cut it up and shelter it in a highly dispersed way.
Serres wants to make a regressive movement: "I'm trying to think the multiple as such, to let it waft along without arresting it through unity, to let it go, as it is, at its own pace. A thousand slack algaes at the bottom of the sea." Hearing, listening, is his model of understanding. Hearing stays glued to the noise. "It is still active and deep when our gaze has gone hazy or gone to sleep." In order to coax fleeting form from the vast generative potential that is life one must labor "in this sheer sheeting cascade (...) one must swim in language and sink, as though lost, in its noise." Distance reduces to zero. Or quasi to zero. It can't be zero because then we drown in the oceanic, we are shot through with sound and fury. As we listen to its two-dimensional projection as white noise there is nothing to hold on to. We need a perturbation, a minimal differentiation, an other, an écart, an echo to gain a foothold. "In the beginning is the echo. Everything begins at the threshold of the echo." Echo. Statistically speaking a 'redundancy'. In the world of beings: a recognition of our presence in someone's mirror.
What leads us to it? From what disposition are we able to pick up this 'perturbation'? Serres asserts that our ability to let form emerge from potential, to make change blossom "would tell ultimately, would tell above all the simple happiness of living as a commonality in the heart of a city, the subtle pleasure of inventing, within the plurality, one's own conduct, one's own language, one's own individual work and private existence, one's body itself." Western culture is intoxicated by its capacity to rationalise and to 'speak'. There are few philosophers who have taken listening seriously. Serres is one of them; he glues us with our ear to the background noise of the sea.
June 5, 2024
"The noise is the sum space of the places taken"
"I am a semiconductor, I admit it, I am the demon, I pull among the multiplicity of directions the direction that, from some upstream, comes at me"
Atrevendo-se a deitar por terra os vários sistemas epistemológicos dentro do qual teorizamos a realidade, e, paradoxalmente, apoiando-se em várias personagens da literatura e seus escritores, Serres propõe um novo sistema de percepção da realidade, um que, por sua vez, nos orienta para a multiplicidade, o ruído, o caos, o eco, através de relações não hierárquicas.
Uma teoria de tudo, de ser como relação.
"I am a semiconductor, I admit it, I am the demon, I pull among the multiplicity of directions the direction that, from some upstream, comes at me"
Atrevendo-se a deitar por terra os vários sistemas epistemológicos dentro do qual teorizamos a realidade, e, paradoxalmente, apoiando-se em várias personagens da literatura e seus escritores, Serres propõe um novo sistema de percepção da realidade, um que, por sua vez, nos orienta para a multiplicidade, o ruído, o caos, o eco, através de relações não hierárquicas.
Uma teoria de tudo, de ser como relação.
May 7, 2017
I loved this book. This is poetry to me. enough said.
May 19, 2019
A monstrous static of semi-gibberish buzzing around a few intriguing insights. But the English translation adds incidental art to turn it into a sort of music concrète.
November 29, 2019
Too confusing for me. Might reread later.
July 3, 2024
"Le bruit de fond, je crois, ne dépend pas de moi, il ne dépend de personne, il est permanent, il est là pour tous, il est le fond de l’espace et du temps, ce en quoi reposent les choses" (p. 108).
What a profound text. Describing existence. It's about how everything is born out of disorder. Noise. Bruit. In the first chapter the text describes, no, opens up, the freshness of life, as it is always there in our existence without that we probably realize it so often. We do get older, yes, but the new beginnings keep on coming and happening, to ourselves as well as to others. It’s a big consolation and a source of unending happiness. We could just remind ourselves of that, and open ourselves to it.
The text is repeating itself in continuous minor variations, and then, suddenly, it breaks open and offers something really new, as it, in fact, continuously happens in existence.
I don’t think it’s very difficult what Serres offers in this little book. You should just immerse yourself in it and be open to its workings. There is no complication needed in order to understand it rightly. But there is lots of repetition, and incomprehensibility, making the text sometimes boring to the full. And also then: sudden flashes of light, of insight. Often the text reminded me of Timothy Morton. Endless seemingly nonsensical repetition with sudden flashes of illumination. But Serres is calmer than Morton, more regular, more poetic too. Thus his prose is also more credible, as if Serres describes nature in a profound way, whereas Morton describes it 'just' in a wild way.
Serres is a seer who can do magic. But only if he feels like it… or if you feel like him doing it. ‘Les bruits qui viennent et qui vont dépendent d’un observateur, ils dépendent d’une écoute’ (p.108).
Describing nature, that’s what Serres does. Like Lucretius’ poem ’On the things of nature’. Describing the chaos of nature, the sudden order of it, describing human nature, the power in it, the evil in it, the nature of societies. Abstract description, stunningly consistent in ever-changing ways, like physics, like meta-physics, like phenomenology. Dense. Hermetic. Boring. How many times did I wish to quit and end this suffering? Boring, self-referent, weightless; but then again, with all this boredom suddenly as stunningly impressive as Spinoza’s starting pages of his Ethics, as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as Heidegger’s Being and Time, all equal in their suggestion of eternal repetition as the essence of the world with flashes of light sparkling through.
Is this phenomenology in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty? Probably it is, the parallels in form are striking. But most probably, it is meta-phenomenology.
What a profound text. Describing existence. It's about how everything is born out of disorder. Noise. Bruit. In the first chapter the text describes, no, opens up, the freshness of life, as it is always there in our existence without that we probably realize it so often. We do get older, yes, but the new beginnings keep on coming and happening, to ourselves as well as to others. It’s a big consolation and a source of unending happiness. We could just remind ourselves of that, and open ourselves to it.
The text is repeating itself in continuous minor variations, and then, suddenly, it breaks open and offers something really new, as it, in fact, continuously happens in existence.
I don’t think it’s very difficult what Serres offers in this little book. You should just immerse yourself in it and be open to its workings. There is no complication needed in order to understand it rightly. But there is lots of repetition, and incomprehensibility, making the text sometimes boring to the full. And also then: sudden flashes of light, of insight. Often the text reminded me of Timothy Morton. Endless seemingly nonsensical repetition with sudden flashes of illumination. But Serres is calmer than Morton, more regular, more poetic too. Thus his prose is also more credible, as if Serres describes nature in a profound way, whereas Morton describes it 'just' in a wild way.
Serres is a seer who can do magic. But only if he feels like it… or if you feel like him doing it. ‘Les bruits qui viennent et qui vont dépendent d’un observateur, ils dépendent d’une écoute’ (p.108).
Describing nature, that’s what Serres does. Like Lucretius’ poem ’On the things of nature’. Describing the chaos of nature, the sudden order of it, describing human nature, the power in it, the evil in it, the nature of societies. Abstract description, stunningly consistent in ever-changing ways, like physics, like meta-physics, like phenomenology. Dense. Hermetic. Boring. How many times did I wish to quit and end this suffering? Boring, self-referent, weightless; but then again, with all this boredom suddenly as stunningly impressive as Spinoza’s starting pages of his Ethics, as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as Heidegger’s Being and Time, all equal in their suggestion of eternal repetition as the essence of the world with flashes of light sparkling through.
Is this phenomenology in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty? Probably it is, the parallels in form are striking. But most probably, it is meta-phenomenology.
December 30, 2015
Bueno, Serres es un prodigio. No solo el pensamiento, sino la manera en que lo vuelca página tras página.
May 19, 2013
Yes, my next tattoo will be a quote from this book. Incredibly thought-provoking.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews