Quotes from Michel Serres

The only philosophy is that of language, the only religion is that of the word.

only philosophy can go deep enough to show that literature goes still deeper than philosophy

On peut presque tout faire sans lumière sauf écrire. Ecrire demande des lueurs. Vivre se suffit d'ombre, lire exige la clarté. Fast alles kann man ohne Licht tun, außer Schreiben. Zum Schreiben ist Licht nötig. Zum Leben genügt Dunkelheit; Lesen braucht Helligkeit.

We no longer live addicted to speech; having lost our senses, now we are going to lose language, too. We will be addicted to data, naturally. Not data that comes from the world, or from language, but encoded data. To know is to inform oneself. Information is becoming our primary and universal addiction.

Now it could be said that he who cheats and deceits does so because he wants to win. So the first attribute of God consists in being indifferent to winning. Detach yourself from notions of winning or losing, be indifferent to victory or loss, you will enter into science, observation, discovery and thought.

What is the good of power and precision if the price we pay is ugliness and death? What is the good of thinking, if we have no idea how to live?

The body receives gratuity. The world gives graciously, disinterestedly, asking for nothing back, expecting nothing in return; it has no scales, no balance sheet. Our senses cede nothing in return for it, can give nothing back to the source of given beauties. What could the eye give back to the sun, or the palate to the vines of Yquem?

Die Musik wird aus dem Rauschen geboren: das erste menschliche Lallen, die erste Information im Chaos. Aus seiner Quelle entsprungen, lässt dieser Strom der Arrangements und Kombinationen, der in Melodien und Harmonien zur Sprache hinabfließt, die Negentropie anwachsen.[...]

We adults have transformed our society of the spectacle into a pedagogical society whose overwhelming competition, willfully ignorant, has eclipsed the school and the university. The media long ago took over the function of teaching— the time when one hears and sees, the time of seduction and consequence.

With their cell phone, they have access to all people; with GPS, to all places; with the Internet, to all knowledge. They inhabit a topological space of neighborhoods, whereas we lived in a metric space, coordinated by distances.

Gradually, however , knowledge became objectivized, first in scrolls or on pieces of vellum or parchment, which were the supports of writing; then, during the Renaissance, in books made out of paper, which found their support in the printing press; and finally, today, on the web, which is the support of email messages and information

Faced with these mutations, we no doubt need to be invent-ing unimaginable novelties, far outside the obsolete frameworks that still format our behaviors, our medias, and our projects—all of which are being drowned in the society of the spectacle.

Qui expérimente ? Le corps. Qui invente ? Lui. Et qui flotte, court et vole, en ivresse archangélique lorsque l'intuition bienheureuse le baigne et le fait léviter ? Le corps, oui, le corps encore. Nu. Confite en logique et en mémoire, toutes deux machinales – laissez-les donc aux machines –, l'intelligence reste bête et lourde sans lui, ailé. Ascension : il vient d'appareiller

Undergo the quiet treatment of the five senses. It is enough to accept what is gratuitously given.

Nothing is constructed, made or invented, except in relative peace, in a small, rare pocket of local peace maintained in the middle of the universal devastation produced by perpetual war.

Why have these innovations not taken place? I hesitate to accuse philosophers (I consider myself to be one of them), although their vocation is to anticipate the knowledges and practices to come, and it seems to me that they have failed in this task. Preoccupied with day-to-day politics, they have not perceived the arrival of the contemporary.

Cogito: my thinking is distinguished from knowledge, and from the various processes of understanding— memory, imagination, deductive reason, discernment, geometry— that have been externalized, along with synapses and neurons, in the computer.

Thumbelina, along with her brothers and sisters, is now producing, like a choir, a background noise that drowns out the voice of writing.

It is the end of the era of knowledge.

A democracy of knowledge has never existed , not because those who had knowledge possessed power, but because knowledge itself required humiliated bodies, including the bodies of those who possessed knowledge.

Order, though practical and effi-cient, can imprison. Although it promotes movement, in the end it can also freeze movement. The check-list, though es-sential for action, can sterilize discovery. An atmosphere penetrated with disorder, by contrast, is like an apparatus that has a certain play in it, and it is precisely this play that provokes invention.

We need order, certainly, but an order without reason. It is reason that must be changed. The only authentic intellectual act is invention. Our preference should be for the labyrinth of electronic chips.

Every abstract idea brings with it an immense economy of thought.

When the old Ptolemaic model had accumulated so many epicycles that the movement of the stars became complicated and unreadable, a change became necessary. The center of the system was moved toward the sun, and everything became clear again. The written code of Hammurabi no doubt put an end to the socio-juridical difficulties that had arisen in oral law. Our own complexities come from a crisis of writing.