Introduction
1. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 165.
2. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
3. De sensu et sensibili, trans. J. I. Beare, in The Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), Vol. 3, sig. B4r, B7v.
4. The ‘Theaetetus’ of Plato, trans. M. J. Levett (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1977), 156b, p. 29.
5. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des sensations: Traité des animaux (Paris: Fayard, 1984), pp. 88, 89 (my translation).
6. J. Cranefield, ‘On The Origin of the Phrase NIHIL EST IN INTELLECTU QUOD NON PRIUS FUERIT IN SENSU’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 25 (1970); 77–80.
7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 2.1.23, p. 117; G. W. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, trans. A. G. Langley (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co., 1916), 2.1 p. 111.
8. Titi Livi ab urbe condita, Vol. 1, Books I-V, ed. Robert Maxwell Ogilvie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I.36.3, p. 47.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 340, pp. 193–4; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O’Neill, 2 Vols (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), Vol. 2, pp. 656–63.
10. Michel Serres, Variations sur le corps (Paris: Le Pommier-Fayard, 1999), p. 96 (my translation).
11. Michael Serres, Hominescence (Paris: Le Pommier, 2001), p. 47 (my translation).
Chapter 1
1. A reference to the Carte du tendre: an allegorical map of the region of the tender sentiments, composed by Mlle de Scudéry in her novel, Clélie (1664–1660).
2. A reference to the distinction Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) makes in his Pensées between the esprit de finesse (the subtle or intuitive mind) and the esprit de géométrie (geometric mind).
3. In Balzac’s tale, Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu (1837), the seventeenth-century painter Frenhofer has been working on his Belle Noiseuse for ten years and can only finish it when he finds the right model. The finished painting consists of a riot of colour, from which a foot partially emerges. Seeing his friends’ disappointment, the painter destroys his painting and commits suicide. Jacques Rivette’s eponymous film is a loose adaptation of the story.
4. Vair is a heraldic term and originally meant fur of two different colours, such as squirrel fur. In Perrault’s version of the fairytale Cinderella, the slipper was made of glass, eliminating the ambiguity of the oral tradition in which the French words verre (glass) and vair (fur) might have been confused.
5. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749).
6. Serres is playing on the French word for armadillo, tatou, which is juxtaposed with tabou in the original.
Chapter 2
1. This sentence draws on two expressions: (i) Vivre d’amour et d’eau fraîche (which translates roughly as ‘to live on love and cold water’. However its usual equivalent is the expression ‘to live on love alone’ which elides the reference to drinking cold water); (ii) Lascia le donne, e studia la matematica (Forget about women and study mathematics instead).
2. Cf. Jules Verne, Le Château des Carpathes (1892).
Chapter 3
1. The reader should bear in mind, throughout this chapter, that the standard French translation of The Symposium is Le banquet. We have rendered banquet variously, as banquet and symposium, depending on the context, but the associations Serres draws between gorging and speaking are present in both usages.
2. Messidor was a month in the French revolutionary calendar, which drew the names of the months from seasonal and natural, rather than mythological, associations.
3. Cf. Diderot, Les bijoux indiscrets (1748).
4. Oil and oc were, respectively, the words for ‘yes’ in the old northern and southern languages of France.
5. The link Serres is making between the Ishim and the bottle of Château d’Yquem is clearer is French, where the Ishim are designated by the name ‘ychim’.
6. Molière, Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre (1665).
7. Floréal, prairial and vendémiaire are also months in the French revolutionary calendar.
8. Cf. ‘élan vital’ in Bergson’s Creative Evolution.
9. Victor Hugo, ‘Ce qui se passait aux Feuillantines vers 1813’.
10. Serres is drawing an analogy with the criteria for an æsthetics of beauty given by Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Judgement.
11. An awkward pun, in English, relying on the dual senses of perception (sensation and taxation or collection) and impostor (deception and taxation). Whereas the root sense of collection, from the Latin perceptio, is now obsolete in English, it remains in active usage in contemporary French.
12. The labyrinth, the bridge, the well and the inn are all stages in Le Jeu de l’Oie (The Game of the Goose), a traditional French board game analogous to Snakes and Ladders.
13. A reference to François Couperin’s harpsichord piece ‘Les Folies françoises, ou les Dominos: La Virginité sous le Domino couleur d’invisible’, from Pieces de Clavecin, Book 3, 13th Order in B minor.
14. San-Antonio is the pen-name of French writer Frédéric Dard, and also the name of the bon vivant chief protagonist in his many thrillers.
Chapter 4
1. Jan Van Eyck, Virgin of Chancellor Rollin, Musée du Louvre (c. 1435).
2. René Descartes, Second Meditation.
3. The French word parasite means both ‘static’ and ‘parasite’ and Serres plays here on this double meaning. See also his book The Parasite, University of Minnesota Press, 2007 (Le parasite, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1980).
4. A reference to Galileo Galilei’s reputed sotto voce response to the Inquisition in Rome (1633) when required to recant his belief that the earth moved around the sun.
5. Author’s note: Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 27th Lesson, Hermann, Vol. 1, p. 434. Note also how the word circumstance is used for the tide: Ibid., 25th Lesson, pp. 405 and 406.
6. Henri Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (1831).
7. Refers to Blaise Pascal’s aphorism in his Pensées, ‘le moi est haïssable’ [the I is hateful].
8. Stanford University Press, 1991 (Rome: le livre des fondations, Grasset, 1983).
Chapter 5
1. See note 11, Chapter 3 for the dual sense, to tax or to perceive, of the verb percevoir in French.