Abstract
Michel Serres is one of the most prolific and increasingly influential contemporary thinkers who has analysed developments in philosophy, literature, and across the arts against the backdrop of the history of science in a series of highly original interdisciplinary studies which collectively represent one of the most illuminating contributions to bridging the divide between “the two cultures.” One of the many ways in which Serres stands out among philosophers of his generation in France is by his antipathy to Nietzsche, for where Nietzsche styles himself “the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,”1 Serres places his own work under the sign of a different deity, Hermes, and devotes five volumes to his celebration, the first of which (1968) concludes with an opposition of the two gods — respectively, “the father of Tragedy” and “the father of Comedy”2 — which sets Serres programmatically at odds with “Nietzsche’s French Moment.”3
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Notes
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ,trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), Ancients 5, pp. 110–111.
Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy,ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell Baltimore arid London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), hereafter cited as H, p.13.
Serres, H3, p. 45; Hermès V: Le passage du Nord-Ouest (Paris: Minuit, 1980), hereafter cited as H5, p. 150.
Corruption — The Antichrist A Chemistry of Sensations and Ideas,“ trans. Chris Bongie, in Nietzsche in Italy,ed. Thomas Harrison (Stanford, CA: ANMA Libri, 1988), hereafter cited as CA.
Serres thus goes further than Prigogine and Stengers who attribute this generalization of difference to Nietzsche, citing Deleuze: cf. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London: Flamingo, 1985), p. 111. Harari and Bell read this argument as a not-so-veiled attack on Derrida himself (H, xxxviin. 49).
For Nietzsche’s response to Mayer and Proctor, cf. KSA 9, 451; for Thomson, cf. KSA 13, 375/WP 1066. For Nietzsche’s intense interest in the scientific theories of his day, cf. Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1962 ), and Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life ( Albany: SUNY Press, 1994 ).
Cf. especially the critique of scientism in GM, III: 23–25, and Deleuze, “Nietzsche and Science,” in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 ), pp. 44–46.
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992 ), p. 128.
Cf. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 3rd edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 326–28; Bernard Pautrat, “Position de l’éternel retour,” in Versions du soleil: Figures et système de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 348–58; Alain Juranville, Physique de Nietzsche ( Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1973 ), p. 85.
Cf. GS 341; Z, III, “Of the Vision and the Riddle”; and Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978 ).
Cf. Gary Shapiro, “Parasites and their Noise,” in Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise. and Women ( Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991 ). pp. 53–107.
Cf., for example, Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, pp. 115–17; Paul Davies, “The End of the Universe,” in God and the New Physics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 199–213 and The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures about the Ultimate Fate of the Universe (London: Weidenfeld * Nicolson, 1994); William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Stephen Hawking, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe” and “The Arrow of Time” (in A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), pp. 12770), and “The Future of the Universe” (in Black Holes and Baby Universes and other Essays ( New York: Bantam Books, 1993 ), pp. 127–41 ).
H4, p. 156. Even this originality of Nietzsche’s is nevertheless qualified in Jouvences: Sur Jules Verne,where Serres traces the pasteurization of culture back to Lucretius: see p. 259.
CA, p. 42. I have modified Chris Bongie’s English translation, which is confusing: “the couple good-evil has rotated a quarter turn in relation to the couple healthy-sick.”
I have modified Bongie’s English translation, which is seriously misleading: “If, without recompense, The Antichrist reverts to dichotomies, it marks nonetheless their breakdown.” The breakdown Serres means is clearly Nietzsche ‘s
CA, p. 31.
Cf. my forthcoming Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 ).
EH, “Preface,” 4. For the symbolism of Genoa in Nietzsche, cf. my article “Nietzsche and the Figure of Columbus,” Nietzsche-Studien, 24 (1995): 162–83.
On the health risks of cheese, cf. Harold J. Morowitz, “The Fromagifkation of America” and “Killer Cheese,” in Entropy and the Magic Flute ( New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 ), pp. 67–74.
Nietzsche discovers that it is in his becoming-sick, in his `blood-poisoning,’ that human promise is to be found,“ notes Keith Ansell Pearson in his remarkable recent book Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 15. In my article ”Nietzsche and the Figure of Copernicus: Grande Fantaisie on Polish Airs“ (New Readings,2 (1996): 65–87), I attempt to demonstrate that this notion of ”mixed blood“ persists even into the phantasmatic delirium of Ecce Homo,where Nietzsche (in the version restored in 1969) declares himself to be ”a pure-blooded Polish nobleman“ (p. 41).
CA, pp. 46–48. I have modified Bongie’s translation, which tidies up this misreading by introducing an extraneous additional step into Serres’s argument: “The Antichrist is an Ante-Christ” (CA, p. 47).
KSA 13, 643–46. In this context one can note that the Carnot of whom Nietzsche writes is not Sadi but his father Lazare, “the soldier and republican.” (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 167.)
H4, p. 290; La Naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce: Fleuves et turbulences V3Paris: Minuit, 1977), p. 236; Le Contrat naturel (Paris: François Bourin, 1990), p. 31ff.
Eloge de la philosophie en langue française,p. 52; cf. Les Cinq Sens: Philosophie des corps mêlés I (Paris: Grasset, 1985), p. 349.
Cf. David Farrell Krell, Infectious Nietzsche ( Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996 ).
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Large, D. (1999). Hermes Contra Dionysus: Michel Serres’s Critique of Nietzsche. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 204. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2428-9_12
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