«In Le Système de Leibniz Serres condemns what he calls ‘umbilical disciplines’ or ‘queen disciplines’ that claim to speak the zero-degree truth of all other discourses. If a discourse or way of thinking is umbilical it claims to be the single, privileged access to plain, unvarnished truth, which all other discourses distort or falsify to one degree or another.» Christopher Watkin
My interest in the philosophy of Michel Serres has been growing over the last few years. This has led to a convergence with Vilém Flusser. My first attempt to create a dialogue between the two philosophers is the essay “Thinking Plurality. Vilém Flusser and Michel Serres: A philosophical convergence” (2022) that compares Vilém Flusser’s and Michel Serres’s notion of plurality.
Flusser’s and Serres’s writing and thinking are strikingly similar even if they radically diverge on some points. For both philosophers, thinking is not a linear progression that moves straight ahead along a simple line, but a journey full of meandering and surprising twists and turns, which can lead back on its tracks. To describe this complex contradictory movement, Flusser uses the spatial metaphors of the circle and the spiral. This is best exemplified in his practice of multiple translations and retranslations, and the Jewish method of Pilpul. Serres, on the other hand, uses the metaphors of the randonnée – a random stroll across a landscape –, the wild flight of a wasp and the unfolding and refolding of a plane of dough. Both authors reject a view of reality based on a single centralized point of view, an umbilical vision of the world, as Serres called it. They both question systematic thinking and favor theoretical plurality and openness. In Flusser’s view, synthesis brings points of view together that often radically differ from each other. For Serres synthesis is a cluster of differentiated but organized relations. Flusser’s and Serres´s thinking is non-linear, non-hierarchical and always open-ended, a proliferation of fixed points to infinity. For both thinkers these different points of view are equally valid. The essay is based on a prerecorded online speech I held at the international conference VII CoMcult Flusser 101 (September 13 to 17, 2021).
The relationship between Serres and Flusser plays a central role in Philosophie des Windes. Versuch über das Unberechenbare. Both philosophers have used the cloud and the wind as epistemological metaphors. I my new book-project Philosophy and Faith. M. McLuhan, J. Ellul, V. Flusser and M. Serres On Religion and Technology I am going a step further juxtapposing their work in the name of religiosity and faith introducing two kindred philosophers: Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul.