Michel serres on Lucretius

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Notes

Notes

1. Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce (Paris: Minuit, 1977); The Birth of Physics, trans. J. Hawkes, ed. D. Webb (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), hereafter NP, followed by page references to the French and then English editions. Serres’ work is a study of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. There are several good editions of the text, among which are: De Rerum Natura, ed. and trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975); On the Nature of the Universe, a verse translation by R. Melville (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999). References will be given simply by book and line number, and translations are from Melville.

2. Serres refers to Kant's text Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens, placing it in the context of the atomist tradition. The themes to which he refers here will be discussed below in this paper.

It opens with the principles of mechanics in the manner of the atomists, it cites Epicurus, while apologising for this reference to an atheist. That said, it introduces two forces, the Newtonian, that is to say gravity, and another, unspecified, in which we recognize deviation: it produces a plane, said to be a systematic distribution, in which we recognize the obligatory plateau, and in which are grouped the dense conjunction of agglomerated things. There we have it. [… Kant] remains a Cartesian beyond Newton, and an Archimedian beyond Descartes. And, when all is said and done, an Epicurean. (NP 48/36)

3. See Hanjo Berressem, “Incerto Tempore Incertisque Locis: the Logic of the Clinamen and the Birth of Physics” in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005) 51–71, for reference to other aspects of the inheritance from atomism in contemporary science. See also Stephen Lucas “Liquid History: Serres and Lucretius” in the same collection 72–83, for an excellent discussion of the relation between Serres and Lucretius, though one that ultimately remains sceptical of the apparent reductionist tendencies inherent in an extension of a material theory of nature to other areas of discourse, and most especially ethics.

4. Via Serres, this influence has reached the work of others around him, most notably Foucault. For a discussion of this influence, see David Webb “Microphysics: from Bachelard and Serres to Foucault,” in Angelaki 10.2 (Aug. 2005): 123–33.

5. natura quoniam constant neque facta many sunt/ius ad certam formam primordia rerum.

6. For a record of the achievements of Archimedes, see Livy, History of Rome 24.34 and Polybius, Histories 8.3–7.

7. Alongside Lucretius, the single most important influence on Serres is probably Leibniz, who was the subject of Serres’ major work, Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématique (Paris: PUF, 1968).

8. “Law” here is the foedera natura, a regularity resulting from the conjunction of atoms, which Serres calls a contract, a treaty of alliance, a confederation or a convention (NP 134–66/107–34). It is contrasted to the foedera fati, which is a law of nature imposed on a system as the formal condition of its existence in a sense familiar to us from modern science. Following Lucretius, Serres argues for the replacement of the foedera fati by the foedera natura in our scientific and philosophical culture.

9. Serres writes: “The flows spread as fast as possible, always taking into account the conjunction of constraints; they plunge towards equilibrium in minimizing the difficulties as best they can” (NP 66/51).

10. Paths lead along the lines of least resistance (the steepest “slope”), which are themselves shaped by obstacles composed by assemblages of atoms: conversely the obstacles themselves are networks of different paths and “the vessel itself is a flow” (NP 88/69).

11. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, eds. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982) 44. The chapter from which these lines are taken is “Language and Space: Oedipus and Zola,” which is a translation of the chapter “Discours and Parcours” that originally appeared in Michel Serres, Hermes IV: la Distribution (Paris: Minuit, 1977) (in the same year that La naissance de la physique was published). The lines come from p. 201 of the original text.

12. Serres: “Everything is always worse than in the good old days, say the wine-grower, the labourer and the shepherd. The sad thing is that they are right” (NP 215/173).

13. Michel Serres, Genese (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1982) 189; Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nelson (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995) 117.

14. Serres:

Basic time is a tatter, a pathwork or a mosaic, it is a distribution, through which, at times, redundancy passes. A multiplicity marks and shows some redundancy, it becomes spatial when this repetition increases. Should it greatly decrease, then time appears. (Genesis 116)

15. This really follows from the fact that the “general” model is not an empty generic form to be subsequently divided into specific regions, each by definition distinct from the next.

16. Michel Serres, Le Tiers Instruit (Paris: Gallimard, 1991); The Troubadour of Knowledge (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997), hereafter TI, followed by French and then English pagination.

17. Serres begins the first full section after the Preface with a statement of thanks to his school teacher who forced him to write with his right hand, in spite of being naturally inclined to use his left. This, he describes as providing the completion of what had been a hemiplegic body.