The Incandescent

Description

The first translation of the volumes in Michel Serres' classic 'Humanism' tetralogy, this ambitious philosophical narrative explores what it means to be human. With his characteristic breadth of references including art, poetry, science, philosophy and literature, Serres paints a new picture of what it might mean to live meaningfully in contemporary society. He tells the story of humankind (from the beginning of time to the present moment) in an attempt to affirm his overriding thesis that humans and nature have always been part of the same ongoing and unfolding history. This crucial piece of posthumanist philosophical writing has never before been released in English. A masterful translation by Randolph Burks ensures the poetry and wisdom of Serres writing is preserved and his notion of what humanity is and might be is opened up to new audiences.

Michel Serres is Professor in the History of Science at Stanford University, USA and a member of the Academie Francaise. A renowned and popular philosopher, he is a prize-winning author of a number of books, including The Five Senses and Eyes. Randolph Burks is a philosopher specializing in phenomenology and philosophies of the body and nature. He has translated several works by Michel Serres, including the Foundations Trilogy, Rome (2015), Statues (2015), and Geometry (2017).

The Incandescent glows with genius. Michel Serres brings the full array of his analytic, synthetic, and literary powers to bear on the grand narrative of humanity's co-evolution with the natural world. Scientific erudition and philosophical depth come together in a sweeping cultural history that goes to the core of who we are as a species. In these pages the earth itself calls on us to become its curators and the avatars of more fully realized humanity. -- Robert Pogue Harrison, Professor of Literature, Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, Stanford University, USA The title of Michel Serres's The Incandescent aptly evokes its own coruscating shimmer of allusion, thought and style, all superbly captured in Randolph Burks's translation, which performs the same alchemy on English as Serres's writing does on his native French. Dazzling in the audacity of its vision of human possibility, this is one of Serres's great, late masterworks. -- Steven Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Anglophone readers been denied access to this ground-breaking volume for far too long. Randolph Burks offers us lively and sensitive translation of this key text in which Serres introduces his wide-ranging account of our universe's 'Grand Narrative', showing how it provokes a radical reassessment of the human and the animal, language and technology, nature and culture, religion and secularity. This volume represents an important moment for debates in posthumanism, ecology, and the philosophy of objects and the material. -- Chris Watkin, Senior Lecturer in French Studies, Monash University, Australia Michel Serres is one of France's greatest philosophers, and his greatest works, in my view, are Hominescence and The Incandescent. Published in the at the turn of the millennium, the books present an overarching philosophical vision of human evolution, and the position hominins occupy in the "grand narrative" of the universe given to us by the sciences. In this context, The Incandescent is not only a profound meditation on the multiple memories that constitute us as humans-individual, cultural, biological-but also a subtle analysis of the cognitive and political transformations being brought about by our contemporary technologies, which are in fact giving birth to a new human being. -- Daniel Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University, USA