Re-mapping the territory (original) (raw)

Identifying the traits of "modemity" has been a popular sport for some time. Jean Wahl's 1932 Vers le Concret highlighted the turn from modernity's fascination with abstractions (pure reason, ideal languages, formal systems), to a more comprehensive emphasis on the concreteness of human experience. Santayana, one year earlier, had fastened onto contrasting images: city and country, stable subject and wayfarer: "The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind .... "(Santayana, p. 130). Combining Wahl and Santayana results in an emphasis on the concrete accompanied by the revival of a pre-Renaissance anthropology (exemplified, for example in the Hebrew scriptures, in the Odyssey, in Chaucer). Such an anthropology would consider the human not only as a being-in-time, but also, in the expression of Gabriel Marcel, as homo viator, the being who is a wanderer. On the contemporary scene, there is an important philosopher, too little known in English speaking countries, whose writings blend a turn to the concrete with a pre-modem sense of the human being as homo viator. He is Michel Serres, the latest philosopher named to the Academie Franfaise. Accessibility to this thinker is made difficult by a carefully crafted, yet demanding, writing style. This difficulty is compounded by his penchant for producing texts that are evocative rather than logically rigorous, and by his rejection of scholarly apparati. Very rarely will one find a reference or a footnote in his books. What one does find are constant allusions which require from his readers a prodigious acquaintance with the history of philosophy, with literature, science, mythology, and religion. The book under review is even more exacting than most. This results, in part, from Serres's rejection of Cartesian-influenced methods in favor of an approach which, repudiating any absolute starting points, combines material from various fields. Atlas discusses, for example, chaos theory, commercials, virtual reality, the Belgian comic book Tintin, mythology, the political creation