"The past Is No Longer Out-of-Date": Topological Time and Its Foldable Nearness in Michel Serres's Philosophy

Configurations

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 235-244

  Ma, Ming Qian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750077606     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.2000.0012     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. The quote in the title is taken from Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 48.
2. Ibid., p. 48.
3. Michel Serres, Feux et signaux de brume: Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1975), p. 164.
4. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 32-33, 63.
5. Bruno Latour, "The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy," in Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 83-97; quotation on p. 89.
6. Maria L. Assad, Reading with Michel Sénés: An Encounter with Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 5. Assad's book is a systematic and diachronic study of Serres's major works from the perspectives of contemporary sciences, such as that of chaos theory, and its grouping of these texts is intended, as the author has stated in the introduction, to provide "a global approach to Serres's thought, so that a progressive development becomes visible, from chaotic multiple to circumstances, to dynamical statues, to a portrait of dynamical cultural systems that create time as an operating factor of their inventive drive" (p. 5). As such, it does not engage some of Serres's most explicit, vivid, and imagistic articulations scattered in other sources such as Conversations-articulations that capture, both synchronically and in a most illustrative way, Serres's notion of topological time, which, though always at the heart of his major works, is, more often than not, only implied or alluded to in diverse theoretical contexts. Therefore, throughout this essay, which is intended to focus only on certain aspect of Serres's thinking in a rather limited manner, Assad's observations will be referred to when pertinent to the issues under discussion, regardless of the "progressive development" with which she is concerned.
7. Jacques Derrida, Aporitis, Irans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 13-14.
8. Karl Simms, "The Time of Deconstruction and the Deconstruction of Time," Imprimatur: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 1: 2-3 (1996): 198.
9. Latour, "Enlightenment," pp. 83, 97.
10. Maria L. Assad, "Michel Serres: In Search of a Tropography," in Chaos antt Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 291.
11. Michel Serres, Les cinq sens (Paris: Grasset, 1985), p. 323. Also see Assad, Reading, pp. 5,41,86,88-89.
12. David Wood, "Beyond Deconstruction?" in Griffiths, Contemporary French Philosophy (above, n. 5), p. 193.
13. Ibid., p. 193; emphasis added. (Unless noted otherwise, all the emphases herein are original.)
14. Ibid., pp. 192-193.
15. Derrida, Margins (above, n. 4), p. 63.
16. David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 2, 268 (henceforth abbreviated as DT).
17. For a definition of metalanguage in the tradition of critique, see Latour, "Enlightenment" (above, n. 5), esp. p. 86.
18. Wood, DT, p. xi.
19. See Latour, "Enlightenment," esp. p. 86.
20. Wood, Dr, p. 268.
21. Ibid., p. 113.
22. Derrida, Margins, p. 290 (emphasis added).
23. Margins Ibid., p. 60.
24. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, Irans. D. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 142-143.
25. Wood, DT, p. 271.
26. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 136.
27. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida ami the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 198.
28. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida Ami the Philosophy of Reflection Ibid., p. 197.
29. Jacques Derrida, "The Time Is Out of Joint," in Deconstnictioii Is/in America: A Ne\v Sense of the Political, cd. Anselm Haverkamp (Nerç York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 23.
30. Simms, "Time" (above, n. 8), p. 198.
31. It is neither the purpose of this paper nor the place to give a full treatment of Derrida's deconstruction of time. For a comprehensive study in this area, see Wood, DT, especially "Part Four: Time beyond Deconstruction." For a succinct critical overview of the aporias of time in the history of philosophy, see Simms, "Time," p. 198.
32. Serres, Conversations (above, n. 1), p. 58.
33. Assad, Reading (above, n. 6), p. 6.
34. Wood, DT. p. 270.
35. Latour, "Enlightenment" (above, n. 5), pp. 85, 90.
36. Enlightenment Ibid., p. 89. For a qualification of Latour's argument,
37. see Assad, Reading, pp. 8-9.
38. Latour, "Enlightenment," pp. 91, 89, 91.
39. Enlightenment Ibid., p. 93.
40. Enlightenment Ibid., pp. 94, 86.
41. Assad, Reading, p. 21.
42. Latour, "Enlightenment," p. 96.
43. Enlightenment Ibid., pp. 96, 97.
44. For a brief overview of the critical reception of Serres's style of writing, see also Assad, Reading, p. 8.
45. Michel Serres, Genesis, Irans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 123.
46. Assad, Reading, p. 20.
47. Serres, Conversations (above, n. 1), pp. 60-61.
48. Assad, Reading, pp. 18, 121.
49. See Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, "Introduction," in Michel Serres, Hennés: Literature, Science, Pliilosopliy, éd. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. xiv, n. 5.
50. Assad, Reading, p. 6.
51. Serres, Genesis, p. 115.
52. Serres, Conversations, p. 58.
53. Serres, Genesis, p. 116.
54. Genesis Ibid., p. 117.
55. Serres, Conversations, pp. 57, 58.
56. Serres, Genesis, p. 115.
57. Serres, Conversations, p. 59.
58. Conversations Ibid., p. 60.
59. Assad, Reading, pp. 9, 45. Although the term "timing of space" is used by dynamicists, as Assad has pointed out, its surface meaning contributes to Serres's notion of topological time quite fittingly here.
60. Serres, Hennés (above, n. 47), p. 83.
61. Latour, "Enlightenment" (above, n. 5), p. 85.