The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy

Summary

Il n'est de pur mythe que l'idée d'une science pure de tout mythe

La Traduction, p. 259

The French, it is well known, love revolutions, political, scientific or philosophical. There is nothing they like more than a radical upheaval of the past, an upheaval so complete that a new tabula rasa is levelled, on which a new history can be built. None of our Prime Ministers starts his mandate without promising to write on a new blank page or to furnish a complete change in values and even, for some, in life. Each researcher would think of him or herself as a failure, if he or she did not make such a complete change in the discipline that nothing will hereafter be the same. As to the philosophers they feed, from Descartes up to Foucault's days, on radical cuts, on ‘coupure épistémologique’, on complete subversion of everything which has been thought in the past by everybody. No French thinker, indeed no student of philosophy, would seriously contemplate doing anything short of a complete revolution in theories. To hesitate, to respect the past, would be to compromise, to be a funk, or worse, to be eclectic like a vulgar Anglo–Saxon!

The revolutions were to be so deep and so complete that they left nothing intact of what they had subverted. In the new order of things, and only there, there was everything needed to think—until, that is, a new upheaval relinquished this order to the same obscurity.