At the end of this week, I will participate in a conference on ‘Michel Serres and Bruno Latour in conversation‘ at the Maison Française d’Oxford. You can participate online.
My talk will be on ‘Nothing but Experience: The Empiricisms of Serres and Latour’. The abstract:
“In his later work, Bruno Latour explicitly embraces the label of ‘radical empiricism’, which, inspired by Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, he traces back to the work of William James and A. N. Whitehead. It is a form of empiricism that places experience at the center of philosophy, a ‘pure’ experience that does not reduce it to sensory data. The value of concepts and ideas, moreover, must be weighed by tracing their connection to and impact on our actual experience.
What is less well known, however, is that Serres also draws on a certain form of empiricism in his work, perhaps most explicitly in Les cinq sens (1985). What is less clear, however, is what this form of empiricism entails. And where, at first glance, it seems to coincide in several respects with Latour’s radical empiricism, there are also a number of fundamental tensions at play. This paper will explore some of these tensions, comparing Serres’s empiricism with that of Latour. In particular, I will look at the role of mathematics, information theory, and the astrophysical revolution in inspiring Serres’s philosophy of the ‘transcendental object’. The result seems to be an empiricism that does not start from a fixed point, including that of ‘pure’ experience.”
The general description of the conference:
Eclaircissements (Conversations on Science, Culture and Time) is the original title of the volume of five dialogues between Michel Serres and Bruno Latour published in 1992. Widely translated, this book reflects a time of intense and joyous dialogue and sharing ideas. This conference aims to shed new light on their philosophical dialogue and explore how their views compare, clash, dovetail and are mutually enriching. How do, for instance, The Natural Contract and Politics of Nature, Biogea and Gaia, echo each other. This conference seeks to examine the legacy of Michel Serres in the light of his relation to Bruno Latour and identify continuities and fault lines between the two oeuvres. Beyond the question of legacy, the conference hopes to bring to the fore how both challenged modern categories to reconnect philosophy with the urgent questions concerning the Earth. The conference will also explore how their respective philosophical practices, as they break away from the traditional codes of academic writing, fashioned an idiosyncratic style of their own that allowed them to engage a larger readership and audience.
You can find the website here.
Massimiliano Simons 