Angels in the Archive: Lines into the Future in the Work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres (original) (raw)

Serres The seemingly unbridgeable space of difference between technoscience and culture can be illuminated by considering the valorization of time which is encountered on each of the opposing sides. On the side of the scientists we find the view that their knowledge is not only up-to-date, but has, in fact, surpassed all previous knowledge. If there is a register of inapplicability for scientific knowledge, it is only to be found in the future, not in any other language game or form of life, and certainly not in the past. In this sense, the general self-understanding of science is the archetype of modernity, and is represented perfectly by Descartes' view that his philosophy was first philosophy, a view which might be seen as parodied in Walter Benjamin's commentary on the small Klée watercolour which he owned, Angelus Novus (Benjamin, 1973, p. 259). In short, modernity foreshortens time by denying the past (even though it can see itself being blown by it into the future!). A typical illustration of this denial is given by Michel Serres, in conversation with Bruno Latour: Just yesterday I attended a debate on Lucretius at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where Latin scholars and atomic scientists could not hear themselves talk, with the same schizophrenia as always. On the one hand, those who studied the Latin text – literary critics and philosophers – held forth either on dialectical materialism or on Lucretius' anguish, his heartbreaks, and, on the other hand, the scientists repeated their neutral discourse, launched into orbit without any relation to these soulful matters. Each person was sealed off in his own time. (Serres and Latour, 1995, p. 47) In the work of Gaston Bachelard, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and many others, this gap between two times was called or treated as a rupture, and the idea of the epistemological break was not merely accepted, it gave rise to a style of ruptural thinking, and to an aesthetics of parallel incomprehensibilities. Serres suggests that we might now see the foundation of this notion of rupture as arising from the quasi-religious belief that a new time has come into being, entirely different