56 Michel Pierssens, Michel Serres

direct access to understanding. I have only to open a book to roam effortlessly

in the world designed for me by Proust and others like him. The other route
takes me through a frustrating labyrinth, with unending new vistas such as
fascinate the reader in the library of Babel. Indeed, the first way is through
a book, the second through a library of libraries. I still have to decide whether
there is any connection between Book and books, and vice-versa.
But, while I was dreaming my way through so many questions and
texts, thinking the thread was hopelessly lost, I came to realize that, even
though my quest had produced no result of the sort I wanted, something
had happened: Time had passed and, in the end, I was not quite the same as
I thought I was at the beginning (once again, having read Proust, I should
have known). True, for the most part my efforts had been in vain, but not
totally: I have become a different man, both a little wiser and with a better
overall knowledge of a very small slice of the past. I know that the Unknown
keeps growing faster than the grasp I try to gain on it, but the pleasure I find
in assembling ever-smaller bits and pieces of what’s left of the 19th century
is getting stronger every day. I used to be a “specialist”; I am now an
“amateur,” that is, someone who accepts with bittersweet relief the fact that
to most questions he can confidently reply: “I don’t know.”
Université de Montréal

Michel Serres:

I. Bryce-Hell
First the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but: wind, rain, ice, hail,
and finally drought under an intense sun, eroding the red rock of the canyon
over the course of long eras. Different in duration here and there, the most
resistant of it remains—hence these thousands of aligned, vertical needles.
End of the visit, let’s get in the car and head out to go to bed.
Too bad for the truth, flat and stupid. An Indian legend recounts it
differently: in ancient times a population lived there, in the valley. Filled
with hatred and vengeance, haunted by suspicion and resentment, it was so
violent that God decided to punish it. He turned it into statues, petrified in
its own blood and that of its enemies.
It is thus that I see Bryce Canyon for the first time. Impossible not to see
those legions of the damned. Upright, close together, compressed and

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Michel Serres 57

compiled in rows and columns, by squadrons, brigades and divisions, legions

and army corps—proud, heads high, distinct and helmeted, chests thrust
out, confined in their uniforms, legs stiff beneath their gaiters, immobile, on
the look-out, their weapons resting against their feet, ready to do battle. All
gather in a mass as though on parade beneath the fortified castle that
dominates, behind them, and from which the general will appear to hurl
them into the furnace: Agamemnon and his Greek kinglets, Ajax and Achilles,
to destroy and burn Troy; Darius, to hurl his mob of Persians to assault
Thermopylae; Alexander and his generals commanding the Macedonians
to devastate India; Caesar and his centurions to massacre Gaul till nothing
is left; Attila and his Huns with their scorched-earth policy; Napoleon and
his marshalls to bury the Great Army beneath the snow; White Power to
assassinate the Indians and enslave the Bantus, the Maoris, the Dravidians
… Blucher, Hindenburg, Foch and Joffre, Rommel and Patton … Truman to
incinerate Hiroshima, and the atomic scientists to increase the destructive
power of bombs ... All the chief butchers of the ancient and recent
abominations of “human” history ... and their sons, sacrificed by the
millions—artillerymen, foot soldiers, grenadiers—all finally petrified,
covered and soaked through with coagulated blood for all eternity.
Never having seen Bryce, Dante did not know how to describe Hell.

II. Fontenelle, Troubadour of Knowledge1

I love Fontenelle because he incarnates an ideal of knowledge that today
is rejected. In the nine volumes of his Oeuvres that I have just edited, I found
the old alliance between the culture of science and the humanities—a vital
synthesis in all our authors since the 16th century until quite recently. Today’s
university, grown partial and no doubt stupid, no longer gives one the right
nor the possibility to write a book on the theatre of Pierre Corneille (one of
Fontenelle’s uncles) and another on infinitesimal calculus, or to ponder the
origin of myths and to participate in an expert and inventive way in the
debate between Cartesian vortexes and Newtonian mechanics (a debate I
consider still open, since today’s physics has not yet said the last word on
turbulence). It no longer gives the right to pen a preface to Monsieur de l’Hôpital
et son calcul de l’Infini and to critique Malebranche’s occasional causes; to
write for the theater and the opera, on the one hand, but also to write Eloges
of scientists. Like so many others of our language, Bernard le Bovier de
Fontenelle, a member of both the Académie Française and the Académie

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58 Michel Serres

des Sciences, thinks and invents without making a distinction, as we

unfortunately do, between culture strictly limited by an ignorance of the
sciences, and science limited by its lack of culture. In Fontenelle there is a
marriage between subtlety and geometry. Although we are descendents of
this union, we reject its lesson.
Thus I love Fontenelle’s first volume, Dialogue des Morts, which imitates
Lucian. Not long ago it had seemed to me important to re-write Lucian for
a better comprehension of the history of science and its recent avatars. In
Fontenelle’s second volume, I am delighted with the emergence of the new
discipline of “exobiology,” in his Entretien sur la pluralité des mondes. His
correspondence with Leibniz, another “Troubadour of Knowledge,” dazzles
me in the third volume: La Géométrie de l’infini in fact culminates in the
differential analysis that defines the delicate contacts between straight lines
and curves. In the case of a punctual meeting, Fontenelle calls the straight
line not the “tangent,” but the “touchante,” and if the meeting takes place in
two points in continuing proximity, he calls it “la baisante,” in keeping with
the usage of the time. Echoes of Couperin, one might say. All the more so,
since between these two caresses, a decisive question was being raised at
the time, on the infinitely small, still asked today: does it exist? This is a nice
use of ontology: a Boucher-like gentleness can result in touching one another
in non-existent zones.
The fact that these Oeuvres finish, in Volume 9, with an outline of the
Dictionnaire des Sciences et des Arts, the fruit of a collaboration with Thomas
Corneille, his other uncle, charms me. Diderot and d’Alembert would later
form a couple that would mimic this one. Thus the encyclopedic trend of
the Enlightenment can be found already in Fontenelle. But what strikes me
is not so much the theater and operas of Volumes 4 and 5 (mediocre, at best)
but the Eloges of Volume 6, where the historian of science draws unceasingly
not only upon the thought of Newton and Leibniz on the occasion of the
debate over the invention of differential calculus, but upon the astronomer
Cassini and the geometrist Viviani. (Who does not know the ovals of the
former as well as the window of the latter—intersection of a cylinder and a
sphere?) Fontenelle draws upon Ozanam—theologian, algebraist and
physician, upon Varignon, an ecclesiastic first and an expert in mechanics
second; upon Rolle, of whose work, unfortunately, there only remains the
famous theorem on real roots. And finally, he draws upon the physician
Chirac, the famous Chirac—Pierre, born at Conques in the Rouergues region.
Recently my friend Leprince-Ringuet, a physician as well as a writer,
attempted unsuccessfully to equal Fontenelle’s record of longevity at the
Académie Française. While ill, he wrote me notes filled with wit and with
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this hope. Fontenelle lived to be 100, as we know—a feat in an era when life
expectancy did not exceed 35 years. From Rouen, where he was born, he
and the Corneilles observed, in two generations, the passage from the Fronde
to the precursors of the Revolution. But this story, involving only cadavers,
has little interest compared to the story that says Fontenelle loved marquises.
It so happened that he taught them—ah, the Troubadour of
Knowledge!—the rudiments of algebra and astronomy, in some garden, at
night, before attacking the second chapter, devoted to the courts of love.
This second part of the lesson, given gratis beneath the stars, brought him
glory.
It’s said that in the last decade of his life he forgot the elements of
courtesy he had practiced during his lifetime. Thus one day he failed to
knock before entering the chamber of one of these young marquises, and
pushing open the door, found her in the delicious attire of Eve, so much
appreciated by specialists. Far from offering embarrassed excuses, the
centenarian considered her at great length, dazzled, and lifting his arms to
the heavens, exclaimed, “Ah! Madame, if only I were 10 years younger!”
Paris
translated by Roxanne Lapidus
Notes
1. “Troubadour of Knowledge” is the translation supplied by William Paulson and Sheila
Faria Glaser for Serres’s concept of “Le Tiers Instruit.” See Serres’s The Troubadour of
Knowledge, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997.

Charles J. Stivale:
Every time I feel fascination
I just can’t stand still, I’ve got to use her
Every time I think of what you pulled
me through, dear
Fascination moves sweeping near me
— David Bowie

What are the questions that fascinate you?

This question raises the very question of questioning itself and of the
relation of fascination to knowledge, to the creation of knowledge, and to
the material conditions of its creation. Two sorts of questioning, both practical
and speculative, grip me and pull me through. Some practical questions
are: What can I do as a teacher for my students? What new tools are available
to renew teaching and learning experiences? How do I and we negotiate the

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